4 ms·

Revenue per hour per employee of the big tech companies

14 points by hubraumhugo 4y ago

sagarjs 4y ago
Perhaps we should judge companies by profit per employee per hour and aim to increase that Wouldn’t that be better than just valuation ?
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  Depends entirely on the purpose for which you are judging them.
- hubraumhugo 4y ago
  It depends on the context. Many of Amazon or Tesla's workforces do low-skill work, and each employee isn't bringing in all that much revenue. For software-only companies, this could indeed be an intersting metric aside from just margins.
wizofaus 4y ago
Amazon's a real outlier there, presumably because it doesn't outsource services that make heavy use of low-skilled/low-paid workers. But is that necessarily a bad thing? To what extent do Apple etc. rely on other companies doing "dirty work" for them to ensure only high skilled employees are on their payroll?
- samspenc 4y ago
  Personally, I think of Amazon as a retail outlet with a e-commerce UI, so their margins are bound be low, similar to other retail outlets. IIRC, they are actually making a loss most quarters excluding their cloud computing unit (AWS) which is pulling up their profit margins a bit.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    But surely Amazon have the same profit taking opportunities as other tech giants. Presumably they do make money out of advertising and selling personal data too...
samspenc 4y ago
The number of employees looks off, I wonder if the author used 2021 end-of-year numbers? And maybe 2021 revenue numbers as well? This is current employee count I see on Google Finance for these companies (number in brackets is from the Twitter post): Amazon: 1,608,000 currently (1,298,000 in original post) 24% increase Apple: 154,000 (147,000), 5% ⬆ Alphabet: 163,906 (135,300), 21% ⬆ Microsoft: 181,000 (163,000), 11% ⬆ Meta: 77,805 (58,600), 33% ⬆ Netflix: 11,300 (11,300), this doesn't appear to have changed?
fallingfrog 4y ago
For reference that’s 85k on the low end (Amazon) and 663k per year on the high end (Netflix). It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder what it be like if the workers at Netflix actually took home that kind of money.

14 points by hubraumhugo 4y ago

Perhaps we should judge companies by profit per employee per hour and aim to increase that Wouldn’t that be better than just valuation ?

codefreeordie 4y ago
Depends entirely on the purpose for which you are judging them.
hubraumhugo 4y ago
It depends on the context. Many of Amazon or Tesla's workforces do low-skill work, and each employee isn't bringing in all that much revenue. For software-only companies, this could indeed be an intersting metric aside from just margins.

wizofaus 4y ago

Amazon's a real outlier there, presumably because it doesn't outsource services that make heavy use of low-skilled/low-paid workers. But is that necessarily a bad thing? To what extent do Apple etc. rely on other companies doing "dirty work" for them to ensure only high skilled employees are on their payroll?

samspenc 4y ago
Personally, I think of Amazon as a retail outlet with a e-commerce UI, so their margins are bound be low, similar to other retail outlets. IIRC, they are actually making a loss most quarters excluding their cloud computing unit (AWS) which is pulling up their profit margins a bit.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  But surely Amazon have the same profit taking opportunities as other tech giants. Presumably they do make money out of advertising and selling personal data too...

samspenc 4y ago

The number of employees looks off, I wonder if the author used 2021 end-of-year numbers? And maybe 2021 revenue numbers as well? This is current employee count I see on Google Finance for these companies (number in brackets is from the Twitter post): Amazon: 1,608,000 currently (1,298,000 in original post) 24% increase Apple: 154,000 (147,000), 5% ⬆ Alphabet: 163,906 (135,300), 21% ⬆ Microsoft: 181,000 (163,000), 11% ⬆ Meta: 77,805 (58,600), 33% ⬆ Netflix: 11,300 (11,300), this doesn't appear to have changed?

fallingfrog 4y ago

For reference that’s 85k on the low end (Amazon) and 663k per year on the high end (Netflix). It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder what it be like if the workers at Netflix actually took home that kind of money.