[sjtindell]

Hired 10,000 people in Q2 this year alone? What percentage of those people actually do anything of value besides cash the company’s checks? That’s actually staggering to me. Cloud division I can see growing. What else?

[blululu]

A lot of very smart people have also looked at the growth prospects of cloud and urged more investment, but I am not sure if their claims have panned out. The reality is that after a decade of heavy investment Google Cloud is still a distance 3rd. To make matters worse, the Cloud division's growth is mostly on the cost side of the balance sheet. GCP has a larger more expensive staff than its two leading competitors and a very unfavorable cost structure on a unit basis. (Perhaps this problem is a consequence of people advocating for more investment in Cloud). Given that Cloud a much bigger cost center than Search and somehow grows more year over year I would actually think that Cloud is what ultimately destroys the company.

[ghaff]

Google pretty much has to make Cloud work eventually or they're toast. (Or at least a much shrunken and less relevant company that certainly needs a fraction of their current engineering staff.)

[monkey_monkey]

Adwords executives eager to help you maximise the value of your future Adwords spend.

[darkr]

Google has >= 100k employees. With a “healthy” staff turnover rate of 10%, they’re not growing.

[pyrale]

10% per quarter? What is the unhealthy rate?

[willcipriano]

That would be 40%

[badlucklottery]

I'm guessing it's 10k total hires not +10k net hires.

[jihadjihad]

Even with that distinction and knowing Google's size, that's still a staggering figure for one quarter.

[kyrra]

These stats are part of our SEC filings I believe. Various sites graph it.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...

[clintonb]

The check cashing is outsourced. I’ve toured the facility where it happens.

[Symbiote]

Does paying by cheque have additional charges? I'm surprised it's common enough to need a "facility".

Paying by credit card or an electronic transfer presumably doesn't need an office of people shuffling paper around.

(I haven't used a cheque since about 2010, and I've never seen them used between businesses.)

[chongli]

Does that figure include interns and other temporary workers? If so, it’s easy to see how Google could hire 10,000 of those without growing the full time staff.

[id]

There are still companies out there handing out physical checks??

[ChrisAntaki]

Google offers a lot. They want to offer more. The market will determine what's valuable.

[timomax2]

Google products are mostly over rated.