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> Google has 50,000. By contrast, Microsoft has 128,000, HP has 300,000, IBM has almost 400,000, and DEC had about 300,000 at its peak.

How many of those were really engineers, rather than managers, marketing people, consultants, support?




A lot are consultants, at least at HP and IBM. (Microsoft and DEC are much more engineering-heavy; I've heard that Microsoft has the structure of 1 engineer, 1 PM, and 1 tester per team.) Remember that out of Google's headcount, only about 20,000 are engineers. When I was on Search, Bing had more engineers working on it than Google Search.




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