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Comment by umjames | Hacker News Reader

If that's the case, then why not stop hiring until more sufficient talent becomes available? Does this mean that Google's new hires are primarily there to increase headcount?

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Your responsibility to your shareholders is not to maintain the highest profits/employee - it's to deliver the highest total profit per share. If you need people, and can maintain the 3/2 ratio, you should add them.

Your responsibility to your shareholders is not to maintain the highest profits/employee - it's to deliver the highest total profit per share.

Management is legally obligated to act in the long-term best interests of the company; that is NOT the same as "deliver the highest total profit per share." For more, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule http://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/25/what-obligation-maximise...

You seem to present a dichotomy for employment motivations: securing talent (i.e. so Facebook can't have 'em) vs. increasing headcount. However, Google is probably hiring because they have more opportunities and workload than their existing employee base can handle.

It's a difficult situation to be in. Google can't stop hiring because the only asset the company has is brainpower. If they don't continue to recruit the best they will wither into just another internet company. Many large companies can sit on their existing products because there exists some competitive advantage that prevents competitors from overtaking them in the near term. Google's competitive advantage is the algorithms and data, both of which result from having top talent, hence the need for them to continue hiring.

I'd argue that brainpower is not their only asset. It's an important input, but not their most important "asset". True assets can't walk out the door one day and not come back. People can do that, at any time. I'd say that Google's best assets are their vast technology infrastructure that's been "proven" and optimized for performance, reliability, etc., plus their brand and their existing userbase inertia. Employees can come and go. They are very useful and valuable. But Google's codebase and hardware isn't going to simply disappear one day on a whim. Folks like Guido and Vint Cerf and Thompson and Kernigan, etc., just might. Plus humans have egos and ambitions and dreams, and get old and tire or lazy or want lifestyle changes. Code and machines do not. A true asset can be sold off like a commodity. An employee cannot be sold off like this, not directly and explicitly anyway.

Google owns one unreproducible asset: its data. Indices, searches, clickstreams for hundreds of millions -- even billions -- of users, going back a decade.

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