Poster is correct: that is not the reason for them.
We can confirm this. Compare RSUs granted/year -- $150M -- to buybacks this quarter -- $70B. ~700x as much.
- Unvested grants over 4 years vs. buybacks this year - #s are for 2020, not 2023 - # excludes tax witholdings (i.e. shares they'll never grant). - For 2020, grants of 15.539 - 10.273 witholding = ~5B, matching sibling comment's correction - $2.324B is one of 4 columns, real number is $50.274 B - so for 2020, real #s are 5.26B in unvested grants over 4 years versus 50.274B in buybacks that year. - for 2023, 22.578 - 10.164 = 12.4B in unvested grants over 4 years, versus 62B in buybacks that year
Let's say the average engineer gets $100k/year in RSUs. (I would guess the actual number is higher.) That would only cover 1500 engineers.
In general people way overestimate the # of SWEs at Google relative to the employee #, even within Google.
I don't wanna get too cute in public but some fermi estimates including, say, number of employees per engineer at a 100 person startup, and a jaundiced yet correct view of how much is outsourced at a company with a lot of grunt level SWE work common to every company, bridges the multiplier from there.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1364742/000156459021....
