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> Interesting to compare the tech companies of last century with those of this era. The 'tech companies' (equivalent) of the past tended to deal with physical
by throw0101a 1y ago
> Interesting to compare the tech companies of last century with those of this era.
The 'tech companies' (equivalent) of the past tended to deal with physical goods, and so needed physical means of scaling to become as large as they did.
More recent tech companies are often software goods and services, where physical means of scaling may not be as important (though see perhaps with Moore and Dennard). Though those which deal with physical stuff do seem to have higher counts; see below.
> The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
Not sure if this is completely accurate. Kodak topped out at 145,000 employees in 1988:
* https://rbj.net/2017/09/13/kodaks-decades-of-decline/ https://rbj.net/2017/09/13/kodaks-decades-of-decline/
Apple has 164,000; Microsoft has 228,000; Amazon has 1,610,000.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
- didibus 1y agoWhat if you adjust by market cap?
- specproc 1y agoHeh, I was musing on something I'd read recently that had Kodak as a case study. It was compared with Instagram which had about 10-15 staff when it was bought for USD 1bn. WhatsApp similarly small. I hear tech can be big employers, maybe I'm overselling my point a bit there. That said, the trend is very much towards smaller operations, and a large headcount is not at all required for large money. My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.
- throw0101a 1y ago> My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff. This has been true for most industries even 'with-in themselves': it's called productivity growth. The number of employees (or man-hours) needed to create (say) a tonne of steel has dropped a lot, so where previously you had 'steel towns', now a plant may just have a very few (and produce more tonnage than they've ever done).
- LorenPechtel 1y agoDisagree. It's not a small office worth of staff. You're not counting all the jobs involved in providing the data centers.
- siva7 1y agoThose aren't employees of instagram or whatsapp
- SamBam 1y agoBut they're part of its stack. It wouldn't exist without it. And vice versa, AWS wouldn't have as many employees without companies like Instagram. Kodak required so many because it owned nearly the whole stack. But that said, we can't just add the number of AWS employees to the number of Instagram employees, because we have to prorate it by the total number of companies that use AWS (or whatever).
- kstrauser 1y agoThat's a challenging comparison, though, as Instagram never had to do fundamental research. They wrote an app. One that has to scale to enormous traffic, to be sure, but that came after they were a 10-15 person company. Meanwhile, Kodak was inventing lens technology and film chemistry and manufacturing processes and distribution channels. Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the same industry.
- Melatonic 1y agoTo be fair maybe a better comparison would also be all the people maintaining the physical infrastructure Instagram was using (no idea what Cloud provider they originated on)
- randombits0 1y agoYou are describing CraigsList. No ads, no salesmen, just a small staff.
- DonsDiscountGas 1y agoApple and Microsoft are the 2nd and 3rd largest companies in the US (by market cap), Kodak never came close to that
- scarface_74 1y agoGE however was. It was in the top 10 as late as 2012 when I use to work there.
- glimshe 1y agoMany tech companies still deal with physical goods and employ enough people to fill a city - but no longer in the US and Europe, generally. Whether we want them back is up to us.
- alephnerd 1y agoEver been to Folsom, Chandler, Olathe, Huntsville, Quad Cities, Peoria, Irvine, San Diego, North Chicago, East Liberty, Taylor, etc? We have seen a decrease in companies that work on physical engineering goods, but plenty still remain. The difference is, engineering physical goods has been increasingly automated and skilled for decades now (robotic manufacturing, additive manufacturing, CAD tooling, etc has been a thing for decades now), so you will need at least an associates but often a bachelors degrees in a STEM field to climb the ladder in Automtotive, Aerospace, Electronics, Pharma, Chemicals, and Defense manufacturing. Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA. I don't like the fact that stores like Fry's don't exist anymore, but electronics is a much more niche hobby now than it was 30/40/50 years ago and is much less hobbyist friendly - building something with an 8088 might be fun, but not as much anymore when you can purchase a STM32 for a fraction of what they 8088 was 30 years ago. Coding has becoming a very prevalent hobby now, and access to hobbyist boards like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis has become much more democratized.
- abullinan 1y agoI was a Folsom resident for 15 years. If you’re referring to physical goods, Folsom didn’t produce any. Perhaps you thought Intel site there was a fab? (FYI: Folsom was a small post-goldrush dwindling mining town that turned into a suburban hellhole thanks to Intel: The same strip malls on every block and beige-box sprawl as far as the eye could see. It’s a great example of how rapid scaling culturally starves humans in the long run ... unless you like highschool theater and boomer cover bands.)
- alephnerd 1y agoWhat I mean is Folsom is a city where research into a physical engineering field continues, and primarily for a single employer (Intel), though that remains to be seen with the current rightsizing going on. > The same strip malls on every block and beige-box sprawl as far as the eye could see Plenty of industrial cities are similar. And as I mentioned in the previous response, manufacturing is much more automated and skilled today - it's increasingly a white collar job in nature.
- ljsprague 1y agoLess people on earth back in the day; and more people in farming back in the day.
- OJFord 1y agoIt's also changing political and social landscape though, Cadbury's (though now Kraft-owned) still makes physical chocolate but not from an employee-only model village. Ditto Clark's Village (shoes). (They both happen to be Quaker I believe, but I mean the point more generally.)