[robocat]

I agree.

However making the argument that the marginal gain from an employee has to exceed the marginal cost is much more difficult, so using an average is just a fair proxy for making the point.

My assumption is that Google are smart enough to know extremely well their marginal gain, which must be an upper bound of what they would rationally pay for an employee (salary plus overhead plus opportunity cost plus variance).

Anyone that thinks a Google is employing people at a loss to cause damage to other businesses is a double plus badthinker IMHO.

[mrkstu]

Key word was 'partial'- in no way do I believe that they want valuable employees completely sidelined- just that if they are paying slightly above market and are carrying slightly more employees than they really need, it ends up being neutral or a net benefit to Google to do so.

[robocat]

That seems like a weasel-word, and “partial” was not the gist of your comment, and I have seen similar comments to yours like it is a meme.

Your implication is that the pool of talent is limited and that there is some sort of zero-sum game being played.

The pool of talent is clearly not limited and there are multiple indications of that e.g. a rockstar developer would be employed at rockstar prices of millions (or signed on at millions as per your sports analogy).

If Google were to take a talented person out of the pool, the loss to the competitors is the marginal difference in talent to the next lower talented person.

Put simply, the variation in measurement of talent is large, and training can make huge differences to talent levels. Your premise can’t work without some sort of perfect oracle.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t happen at some microscopic level, or that it doesn’t happen with some particular individuals... Edited: there are just too many sensible reasons why I think it couldn’t happen systematically.