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Does this account for how much those companies offload to contractors / staffing agencies?
by Sebguer 5y ago
Does this account for how much those companies offload to contractors / staffing agencies?
- gorgoiler 5y agoI 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 agoDepends 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 agoThe 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 agoTrue. 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 agoIf 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.
- selcuka 5y ago> which is probably what happened to them inside facebook anyways I think initially they only expanded to ~50 engineers until 900M users. Even today they are estimated to have only ~500 employees (no idea what percentage of that are engineers).
- capableweb 5y agoLinkedIn lists 1823 people working at Whatsapp, not sure how accurate that number is, probably self-reported so could be lower/higher, but ~500 seems off. Employee count seems to grow 1-5% month-to-month. Engineering is listed as 25% of those 1823, operations 8%, education 6% and business development 6%.
- robbedpeter 5y agoGiven recent name changes, MAANG works, but it can be MANGA or MAGNA now. I like "MAGNAM" if you include Microsoft.
- gorgoiler 5y agoAhem, and the G stands for Alphabet? :)
- da39a3ee 5y agoIf F => M then doesn't G => A? Which is good, we don't want to have to go around calling them MAGNA!
- jitl 5y agoEvery one of the Facebook companies is a household name with hundreds of millions of users. The same cannot be said for the Alphabet companies aside from Google.
- adeelk93 5y agoYouTube and Fitbit come to mind
- johanj 5y agoBoth are subsidiaries of Google, not Alphabet.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoChromecast Android ChromeOS I think Oculus is much more similar to Stadia than something else too. Additionally, all of those platforms you mention du the same thing: chat and share pics.
- jitl 5y agoYou listed three Google products. Those are not alphabet companies. No one is trying to say Google is smalltime. Rather the point is, “Meta as an entity is comparable to Google, not Alphabet because it’s Units are Interesting”
- denysvitali 5y agoOT: if you want to start with M, then the correct name would be MAANA