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If that’s $260M pa for 1500 employees then that works out as $40k revenue per employee per quarter. Compare with APPL and FB doing [correction: over $600k] per

If that’s $260M pa for 1500 employees then that works out as $40k revenue per employee per quarter. Compare with APPL and FB doing [correction: over $600k] per employee per quarter. Not a value judgment. But I only recently started noticing these numbers and it really puts the big players’ spending power into perspective. Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive. Edit: thanks for the corrections in the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.

missedthecue 5y ago
I think a lot of startups could be a little more lean than they are right now.
capableweb 5y ago
> Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive. That seems to be changing, as the employees at those companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".
trhway 5y ago
>Compare with APPL and FB doing $2.5M per employee per quarter. your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.
- dhosek 5y ago
  I'm guessing that was a typo and he meant per year since the comparison number was also annual revenue.
Sebguer 5y ago
Does this account for how much those companies offload to contractors / staffing agencies?
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  I don’t know. I do know that “number of employees” metric is a shorthand way of measuring the operational weight of an organisation. As long as it is measured consistently, it’s a good proxy for size-of-tech-company. It might not work so well when comparing a pharmaceutical manufacturer to a main st retailer though.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Depends if you count Facebook's moderators, Uber's drivers, Apple's shop assistants, Netflix's film crews and so on. Some of these measures make it look like Google's zero-customer-support approach is the 'efficient' way to run a business but for a lot of companies it'd be a false economy.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  The economy of scale - at FAANG(MAANG?) scale you can have extremely efficient money making features that only takes a few engineer to support thousands. For things that are completely software, it does not surprise me that millions per employee in earnings is realized - that's just what happens when you operate at that scale. And that's accounting for all of the overhead in personnel that scale entails.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    True. The number of engineers is not linearly correlated with the number of customers, but the number of features. If you have a relatively simple product and you can somehow still compete (niche market, patents etc), you can get away with a very low head count. WhatsApp famously had only 35 engineers and ~450M users when Facebook acquired them.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      If they wanted, they can expand easily to a lot more - which is probably what happened to them inside facebook anyways. Even then, they can still be insanely profitable per engineer.
polskibus 5y ago
They have lots of contractors though , ppl that censor posts, etc. You're probably not taking them into consideration.
- selcuka 5y ago
  One might argue that those are costs, not head count. By the same logic we can also assume that they use contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's. I guess a somewhat better metric would be "profit per employee" instead of revenue.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's" Clearly keeping facebook platform from breaking the law on childporn is pretty central to their business, but pizza is not
    - selcuka 5y ago
      Maybe. But the point is, ad absurdum, you can do business with zero employees and all contractors, or with zero contractors and all employees. It's not possible to measure efficiency with a simple "revenue over employee count" metric.
BbzzbB 5y ago
Point stands, but I'm not sure how you get that much for FB and AAPL. In 2020 (4 quarters) they made, per employee, ~$1.2M and $0.7M in gross profit, $1.5M and $1.9M in revenue. I didn't cross check the table but did get the same number for FB. https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/1423016903476342787 https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278...
blobbers 5y ago
Not surprisingly FB makes money more easily than HashiCorp. Is this surprising in anyway? FB didn't IPO at a 934B marketcap. HEY LOOK, IT'S A PARADE, I'M GOING TO GO RAIN ON IT! "Hey so I joined the high school wrestling team." OH YEAH WELL I BET YOU CAN'T BEAT UP HULK HOGAN.

missedthecue 5y ago

I think a lot of startups could be a little more lean than they are right now.

capableweb 5y ago

> Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive. That seems to be changing, as the employees at those companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".

trhway 5y ago

>Compare with APPL and FB doing $2.5M per employee per quarter. your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.

dhosek 5y ago
I'm guessing that was a typo and he meant per year since the comparison number was also annual revenue.

Sebguer 5y ago

Does this account for how much those companies offload to contractors / staffing agencies?

gorgoiler 5y ago
I don’t know. I do know that “number of employees” metric is a shorthand way of measuring the operational weight of an organisation. As long as it is measured consistently, it’s a good proxy for size-of-tech-company. It might not work so well when comparing a pharmaceutical manufacturer to a main st retailer though.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Depends if you count Facebook's moderators, Uber's drivers, Apple's shop assistants, Netflix's film crews and so on. Some of these measures make it look like Google's zero-customer-support approach is the 'efficient' way to run a business but for a lot of companies it'd be a false economy.
Aperocky 5y ago
The economy of scale - at FAANG(MAANG?) scale you can have extremely efficient money making features that only takes a few engineer to support thousands. For things that are completely software, it does not surprise me that millions per employee in earnings is realized - that's just what happens when you operate at that scale. And that's accounting for all of the overhead in personnel that scale entails.
- selcuka 5y ago
  True. The number of engineers is not linearly correlated with the number of customers, but the number of features. If you have a relatively simple product and you can somehow still compete (niche market, patents etc), you can get away with a very low head count. WhatsApp famously had only 35 engineers and ~450M users when Facebook acquired them.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    If they wanted, they can expand easily to a lot more - which is probably what happened to them inside facebook anyways. Even then, they can still be insanely profitable per engineer.

polskibus 5y ago

They have lots of contractors though , ppl that censor posts, etc. You're probably not taking them into consideration.

selcuka 5y ago
One might argue that those are costs, not head count. By the same logic we can also assume that they use contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's. I guess a somewhat better metric would be "profit per employee" instead of revenue.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's" Clearly keeping facebook platform from breaking the law on childporn is pretty central to their business, but pizza is not
  - selcuka 5y ago
    Maybe. But the point is, ad absurdum, you can do business with zero employees and all contractors, or with zero contractors and all employees. It's not possible to measure efficiency with a simple "revenue over employee count" metric.

BbzzbB 5y ago

Point stands, but I'm not sure how you get that much for FB and AAPL. In 2020 (4 quarters) they made, per employee, ~$1.2M and $0.7M in gross profit, $1.5M and $1.9M in revenue. I didn't cross check the table but did get the same number for FB. https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/1423016903476342787 https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278...

blobbers 5y ago

Not surprisingly FB makes money more easily than HashiCorp. Is this surprising in anyway? FB didn't IPO at a 934B marketcap. HEY LOOK, IT'S A PARADE, I'M GOING TO GO RAIN ON IT! "Hey so I joined the high school wrestling team." OH YEAH WELL I BET YOU CAN'T BEAT UP HULK HOGAN.