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> NASA looks efficient because you’re comparing it to the rest of government. NASA also looks quite efficient when you compare it to many tech companies. NASA
by semi-extrinsic 2y ago
> NASA looks efficient because you’re comparing it to the rest of government.
NASA also looks quite efficient when you compare it to many tech companies. NASA has 18k employees and $25bn budget in 2023, let's compare it with some companies:
Spotify and Stripe are each equal to half of NASA both in terms of employees and budget.
Snapchat and Airbnb are both approx 1/3rd of NASA in both employees and budget.
Yahoo has 1/2 the employees and 1/3 the budget of NASA.
ByteDance is 6x larger than NASA on both metrics.
Meta is 6x larger in budget and 4x larger in head count.
These are just companies making social media apps and selling ads.
- TremendousJudge 2y agoSpotify has a 12bn budget? What are they spending it on? Does it include licensing fees?
- justahuman74 2y agoSpotify doesn't have a great bargaining position against the record labels, they don't make much profit. This is why they've been trying to move into all the other stuff like podcasts
- zamadatix 2y agoHow do I read this employees/budget metric to properly rank efficiency? Is 1,000 employees each with an average burn rate per employee of a $1,000,000/y supposed to be more or less efficient than 2,000 employees with an average burn rate per employee of $500,000/y? If so, why is that a sign of an inherently more efficient company when we haven't even mentioned things like output yet? E.g. some of the companies in the list post a large loss, others post a large gain. If a company doubled it's employee count and posted a 10% change in profit due to staffing budgets why should that result in 100% or 50% change in this metric? Is 1,000 companies with 1 employee each and a budget of $1,000,000/y inherently supposed to be the same efficiency as 1 company with 1,000 employees and a budget of $1,000,000,000/y even if the other company is posting a profit and the small company just spending it all each year? I'm generally on the side of NASA but in this case I just don't understand how to apply this metric in a meaningful way. It seems almost everything else about the company is more relevant to overall efficiency the "amount of money spent in the last year for a given number of people working there". I.e., at the end of the day in terms of efficiency I don't really care if 1 person works at NASA or 100,000 people work at NASA I care how quickly they get meaningful missions completed at a given budget.
- alistairSH 2y agoI think the point was these massive ad companies have similar resources as NASA and don't do anything particularly useful* for society. * For some definitions of useful
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoI'm not saying look at those two numbers divided by each other. In fact the ratio seems to be quite constant across companies. What I'm saying is, take what Spotify is actually producing, and compare that to half of what NASA is producing. Or compare Snap to a third of NASA, etc.
- zamadatix 2y agoSimilarly just because you and I don't like what Spotify produces as much as what NASA produces doesn't really help weigh their efficiency without a whole lot of other data that's more important (before even getting into the debate of what everyone considers worthwhile output). The most efficient pasta producer in the world could premix their pasta with pesto and I don't get to claim it's the same efficiency as every other place just because I despite pesto. I mean I get wanting to shit on adtech over NASA, the latters is... significantly more cool. I just don't get why it's related to explaining how efficient or inefficient NASA is at the significantly cooler stuff.
- tick_tock_tick 2y agoEmployees is a horrible metric to use since NASA contracts out nearly everything.