[ZephyrBlu]

What is the opportunity cost then? What are they trading off by hiring more people?

The fact there is finite budget and headcount doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you're limited by the number of quality employees you can recruit and onboard, budget and headcount are effectively meaningless because they're not limited by money.

[scarface74]

How many useless projects does Google already waste money on? Google has already shown a complete ineptitude at coming out with new profit generating products. Throwing more people at problem with a broken culture won’t do any good.

[vidarh]

That is an argument that they've reached a point where the cost of increasing engineering headcount is as high or higher than the return, not that you don't want to keep increasing headcount until you get there.