As part of a company of less than 30 in a rural region, I get that feeling a lot. I'm sure I'm wrong but what do 57000 google employees do!? Am I really hitting an immense mechanical turk when I use google? Yet they can't spare a single person to spend a few weeks to convert the flash off of google finance?
Kind of, yes! You would not believe how much manual labor goes into maintaining and load balancing data centers and keeping deceptively simple-looking services up and running... There has been some recent press on the work done by legions of SREs that gets into a few of the details.
I dunno we are 3 software devs, 2 network admins (also playing the role of top tier level, on call support) and run our own bare metal servers in two geographically separated collocation data centers. We also have 2 device hardware/firmware guys and the CEO also does a bit of coding sometimes.
Our solutions are sometimes a bit clunky but our infrastructure is audited yearly by an outside firm and certified to carry banking data through the wireless device we designed and through our network. There is another 15-20 people doing financials, payroll, hr, tech support, sales, marketing, assembly, hardware testing, shipping etc..
We maintain multiple backend interfaces to a bunch of (sometimes old and archaic) bank networks and to our wireless devices as well as multiple front end portals for our users.
It's hard to imagine ever being able to make use of 57000 bodies, but I suppose that's a totally different context. We could use a few more.
I worked at Google some time back. Take a look at the list of products [1] that Google provides. It's pretty long! Of those, 7 products have >1 billion monthly actives: Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Play, Maps, Search, and YouTube. Things at this scale take a lot of effort.
Alternatively, a quantitative measure of effectiveness is the company's revenue or net income per employee. For 2015, that's $1.2M / Googler or $264K / Googler, respectively.
