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Profit per Employee at Tech Companies Compared to Other Industries

28 points by dorictemple 17y ago

russell 17y ago
You will learn that Exxon is 300 times more profitable per employee than Starbucks. The original article has more hitech companies http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-staff-210k-in-profit-per-head-in-2008/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s...
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
pg 17y ago
FWIW, this is erosion happening. There aren't, fortunately, that many differences between hn/news and hn/classic, but this is one. A lightweight post that has been voted up almost entirely by accounts less than a year old. I'm not sure what to do about these. It's not offtopic enough to kill, but it doesn't deserve to be ranked #2, as it currently is. The good news is, these are fortunately still quite rare. If they become more common I suppose I'll finally have to implement vote weighting.
- Timothee 17y ago
  I came to the comments just to see what was the reaction to this article which was up early in the morning and still is on the front page a few hours later, even though there's not much content to it. I'm glad you keep an eye on these.
- scorxn 17y ago
  I think new users are especially inclined to vote up headlines related to previously popular articles, regardless of the new article's standalone value. They may think it contributes to the discussion and deserves the same attention. Then suddenly one topic dominates the top slots and most links are junk. Usually, the new article is a hurried blog post that links back to the old, popular one, often in the first paragraph. One rudimentary way to stop this behavior would be to check if the new article contains a very recently popular link.
- quellhorst 17y ago
  I'm glad to see you point this out. When I try to point it out I get -5 karma.
- dorictemple 17y ago
  Hi Paul, I apologize for submitting this article. If it is viewed by the community as sub-par or unworthy please know it was unintentional. My thought was that this take on the article helped put the numbers into perspective relative to other classes of trade. It probably would have made a better comment than submission. I have a huge respect for what has been created at HN and though my account is less than a year old I've been reading for far longer. Two thoughts on things that could be done other than weighting (which I'm actually a fan of). 1. I would make this guideline a bit more explicit "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. -- Reference replies to the primary source in comments unless the analysis is equal to or greater in quality than the original" 2. Create a 2 column approach for comments with "new" on the right and sequential, or popular on the left. This would help some comments get a fair hearing in heavily threaded stories. However neither suggestion will take the place of a strong community. Thanks for calling me out.
  - thorax 17y ago
    It's a decent (though light) link-- it doesn't deserve #2 status, but I still upvoted it. It made me think a bit about what our own company focuses on for measuring ROI. In the book Good to Great, there's discussion on finding a good "denominator". They give Walgreens as an example of maximizing "profit per customer". Any denominator choice tends to have different effects on your business style and this is another way to optimize. In a lot of workforce-intensive industries, I assume it really just mirrors your overall profit as labor costs could be your number one expense.
  - pg 17y ago
    Don't worry about that. The problem is not so much that it got submitted-- all kinds of stuff gets submitted-- but that it got so many votes so rapidly. Could just be a random statistical outlier, come to that.
    - andrewljohnson 17y ago
      If you aren't yet treating the community like they will aggressively abuse and spam the system, I think you should start. Are you looking at any other information about how this story got voted up so fast? I haven't looked at the HN code at all, but I wonder if there is anything sophisticated for stopping people from colluding and spamming. Do these accounts come from the same geographic area? ISP? Do they vote like each other in the past? Vote-weighting doesn't even really seem like it's going to be the solution to the problem. Well, it might end up being the solution if you give a great deal of weight to trusted accounts, but you might in the end discourage new users from contributing. I think maybe you consider attacking spammers head on. I really don't think the problem is a bunch of newbies up-voted this story. HN is just easy to game.
- rms 17y ago
  Isn't that what vote weighting is for?
  - pg 17y ago
    Yeah, but I've been trying to avoid weighting votes. Partly just because I've been impressed by how long I've been able to avoid it.
    - rms 17y ago
      You have said that some sites like xkcd have a permanent downweight. Is it only a domain by domain thing? If it can be story by story then you or the editors can just flag stories as lightweight to tweak the front page at will, or push a second type of flag to the community at the expense of some extra complexity.
- gojomo 17y ago
  This was an interesting followup to the tech company rankings -- but doesn't itself have the weight to justify high billing. Perhaps posting such followup links in comments to the original story could be given higher (or folded-under) placement -- keeping the topics together, giving the original story a greater lifetime, reducing clutter, unifying discussion. (That is, posters or editors could fold stories into existing threads.) Also: can we get comments ranked in classic fashion? Or maybe display two numbers for a comment's score: all/classic? I think I'm seeing more cases where the absolute sign of the score would be different for early-vs.-recent voters.
- russell 17y ago
  Is there any feedback to the submitter why a story is deleted? I've had a couple of stories deleted, one yesterday. Sometimes it's obvious, but this one wasn't to me. Having said that, I'm still in favor of more aggressive pruning. Edit: I'll take that back. It disappeared because nobody cared. :-( Lesson to me.
- pj 17y ago
  Why don't you allow down voting of articles?
- njharman 17y ago
  Does the specific rankings matter? I'd thought the only metric that matters is on/off frontpage. My assumption(perhaps woefully assuming) is that people scan the front page for new/interesting titles and read them. Not that they think "Oh, I'm not reading that it's only at #13, maybe when it breaks into the top-ten."
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- 10ren 17y ago
  What about only counting "orange" users for the frontpage? This seemed a very strong measure of user quality, and it was only reverted because of social effects - which wouldn't be present for frontpage votes. It might also give evidence of whether it really is a strong measure of user quality or not.
Dilpil 17y ago
Goldman Sachs is an interesting case: in 2007, it made above a 3 million per employee profit. Of course, not quite as hot this year. But you can see why young people are so interested in finance.
socratees 17y ago
As of 2007, NTT DoCoMo had a higher profit per employee than Exxon Mobil. Look at the report. http://www.massmac.org/newsline/0707/McKinsey.pdf http://www.massmac.org/newsline/0707/McKinsey.pdf

28 points by dorictemple 17y ago

You will learn that Exxon is 300 times more profitable per employee than Starbucks. The original article has more hitech companies http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-staff-210k-in-profit-per-head-in-2008/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s...

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

pg 17y ago

FWIW, this is erosion happening. There aren't, fortunately, that many differences between hn/news and hn/classic, but this is one. A lightweight post that has been voted up almost entirely by accounts less than a year old. I'm not sure what to do about these. It's not offtopic enough to kill, but it doesn't deserve to be ranked #2, as it currently is. The good news is, these are fortunately still quite rare. If they become more common I suppose I'll finally have to implement vote weighting.

Timothee 17y ago
I came to the comments just to see what was the reaction to this article which was up early in the morning and still is on the front page a few hours later, even though there's not much content to it. I'm glad you keep an eye on these.
scorxn 17y ago
I think new users are especially inclined to vote up headlines related to previously popular articles, regardless of the new article's standalone value. They may think it contributes to the discussion and deserves the same attention. Then suddenly one topic dominates the top slots and most links are junk. Usually, the new article is a hurried blog post that links back to the old, popular one, often in the first paragraph. One rudimentary way to stop this behavior would be to check if the new article contains a very recently popular link.
quellhorst 17y ago
I'm glad to see you point this out. When I try to point it out I get -5 karma.
dorictemple 17y ago
Hi Paul, I apologize for submitting this article. If it is viewed by the community as sub-par or unworthy please know it was unintentional. My thought was that this take on the article helped put the numbers into perspective relative to other classes of trade. It probably would have made a better comment than submission. I have a huge respect for what has been created at HN and though my account is less than a year old I've been reading for far longer. Two thoughts on things that could be done other than weighting (which I'm actually a fan of). 1. I would make this guideline a bit more explicit "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. -- Reference replies to the primary source in comments unless the analysis is equal to or greater in quality than the original" 2. Create a 2 column approach for comments with "new" on the right and sequential, or popular on the left. This would help some comments get a fair hearing in heavily threaded stories. However neither suggestion will take the place of a strong community. Thanks for calling me out.
- thorax 17y ago
  It's a decent (though light) link-- it doesn't deserve #2 status, but I still upvoted it. It made me think a bit about what our own company focuses on for measuring ROI. In the book Good to Great, there's discussion on finding a good "denominator". They give Walgreens as an example of maximizing "profit per customer". Any denominator choice tends to have different effects on your business style and this is another way to optimize. In a lot of workforce-intensive industries, I assume it really just mirrors your overall profit as labor costs could be your number one expense.
- pg 17y ago
  Don't worry about that. The problem is not so much that it got submitted-- all kinds of stuff gets submitted-- but that it got so many votes so rapidly. Could just be a random statistical outlier, come to that.
  - andrewljohnson 17y ago
    If you aren't yet treating the community like they will aggressively abuse and spam the system, I think you should start. Are you looking at any other information about how this story got voted up so fast? I haven't looked at the HN code at all, but I wonder if there is anything sophisticated for stopping people from colluding and spamming. Do these accounts come from the same geographic area? ISP? Do they vote like each other in the past? Vote-weighting doesn't even really seem like it's going to be the solution to the problem. Well, it might end up being the solution if you give a great deal of weight to trusted accounts, but you might in the end discourage new users from contributing. I think maybe you consider attacking spammers head on. I really don't think the problem is a bunch of newbies up-voted this story. HN is just easy to game.
rms 17y ago
Isn't that what vote weighting is for?
- pg 17y ago
  Yeah, but I've been trying to avoid weighting votes. Partly just because I've been impressed by how long I've been able to avoid it.
  - rms 17y ago
    You have said that some sites like xkcd have a permanent downweight. Is it only a domain by domain thing? If it can be story by story then you or the editors can just flag stories as lightweight to tweak the front page at will, or push a second type of flag to the community at the expense of some extra complexity.
gojomo 17y ago
This was an interesting followup to the tech company rankings -- but doesn't itself have the weight to justify high billing. Perhaps posting such followup links in comments to the original story could be given higher (or folded-under) placement -- keeping the topics together, giving the original story a greater lifetime, reducing clutter, unifying discussion. (That is, posters or editors could fold stories into existing threads.) Also: can we get comments ranked in classic fashion? Or maybe display two numbers for a comment's score: all/classic? I think I'm seeing more cases where the absolute sign of the score would be different for early-vs.-recent voters.
russell 17y ago
Is there any feedback to the submitter why a story is deleted? I've had a couple of stories deleted, one yesterday. Sometimes it's obvious, but this one wasn't to me. Having said that, I'm still in favor of more aggressive pruning. Edit: I'll take that back. It disappeared because nobody cared. :-( Lesson to me.
pj 17y ago
Why don't you allow down voting of articles?
njharman 17y ago
Does the specific rankings matter? I'd thought the only metric that matters is on/off frontpage. My assumption(perhaps woefully assuming) is that people scan the front page for new/interesting titles and read them. Not that they think "Oh, I'm not reading that it's only at #13, maybe when it breaks into the top-ten."
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
10ren 17y ago
What about only counting "orange" users for the frontpage? This seemed a very strong measure of user quality, and it was only reverted because of social effects - which wouldn't be present for frontpage votes. It might also give evidence of whether it really is a strong measure of user quality or not.

Dilpil 17y ago

Goldman Sachs is an interesting case: in 2007, it made above a 3 million per employee profit. Of course, not quite as hot this year. But you can see why young people are so interested in finance.

socratees 17y ago

As of 2007, NTT DoCoMo had a higher profit per employee than Exxon Mobil. Look at the report. http://www.massmac.org/newsline/0707/McKinsey.pdf http://www.massmac.org/newsline/0707/McKinsey.pdf