With 600 consultants that is $9M per consultant. I realize they analysts and other staff, but compared to other consulting acquisitions which are often <$500k per consultant. Consultants are notoriously difficult to retain and often clash with new cultures. This time is obviously incredibly specialized which makes them different and I'm sure Google made sure there are strong retention bonuses, but it is a pretty incredible price.
Probably Google Cloud mostly pays for the enterprise customers as the customers seems to be the main issue for the GCP, not the technical aspects of security. And for the going price per head in the tech - Showflake recently bought "PHP, only in Python" company for ~12M/head.
Considering this is HN, you likely simply got a good night's sleep and aren't overly cynical and angsty about the technology landscape today. Cheers to a good day!
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandiant
5.4B is more than a 100 years worth of wages for those laid off.
- more expensive
- more bloated
all while making it:
- less useful
- dumbed down
and in the end
- retire it with a short notice.