[luminati]

~4bb per quarter (16bb annual) in r&d costs for a pure play software company seems high no? What on earth do they spend on? I know they pay high engineering salaries but even factoring that it doesn’t seem to make sense to my simple mind. Twitter comes in 1/16th which i still think is crazy high!

[woobar]

Headcount is at 56K. $4.7B / 56,000 ~= $84K/quarter. Or $336K per year. I guess they spend it on compensation.

[luminati]

But not all would be r&d - assuming 33% of them are programmers/engineers, that comes to ~$1mm/year per person in comp