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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

This is good but clearly wouldn't work in many cases. Amazon, 2019 [1]:

  number of employees = 798k
  yearly pretax GAAP earnings = $13,976,000k
  yearly pretax GAAP earnings per employee = $17,514.

This means if all Amazon employees got an extra $18k year end bonus in 2019 then Amazon would have reduced their GAAP earnings to slightly below zero. You can do this calculation easily for any public company, just find their 10-K's on SEC.gov.

[1] Form 10-K, for FY ended December 31, 2019: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0001...

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Amazon specifically adjusts its margin to show as close to zero profit as possible. Jeff's mantra is "your margin is my opportunity", and on top of that he gets to pay $0 in corporate taxes, what's not to like?

IOW, Amazon is not a very good example.

Let's do Wallmart, latest 10-K, 12 months ending Jan. 31, 2019 [1]:

  Pretax earnings: $11,460,000k
  Employees: 2,200k (yes, 2.2 million people, worldwide)
  Pretax earnings / employee: $5,209

And yes I'm picking examples of companies that have a lot of employees; I'm sure Facebook or Google can bump up bonuses.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/0000104169190...

You're picking examples of companies with deliberately razor thin profit margins.

I agree, but I'm also picking large employers (because that's how you'd get a lot of impact from a change like this). Which one then? :).

Boeing? 10% margin (before the MAX - not in 2019, so not a Google or Facebook but still quite good). 12 months ending December 31, 2019:

  Number of employees: 161k
  Pretax earnings: $-2,259,000k (loss; that's the MAX fiasco)
  Let's take pretax earnings for 2018 instead: $11,604,000k
  Earnings per employee: $72,074

$72k bonus (but nothing more) is theoretically possible, for 161k people.

In a good year, not in 2019 with the MAX troubles. Assuming shareholders are somehow OK with this. And assuming you need $0 for growing your business (like new factories, machines, acquisitions, hiring more people). And assuming you're leaving yourself with zero room for error (no cash cushion for a bad year), because sure as hell Wall Street will not give you investment-grade credit once you need it so that your bonds can go into old people's retirement accounts and slowly blow up there.

How many of the 798k employees are full-time? And of the full-time employees how many are in the US or another country where $70K would make sense as an entry-level salary?

Couldn't find a breakdown in the 10-K, perhaps you can: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0001...

But even if it's 1 permanent to 1 temp, or 1 permanent to 2 temps, it's still a little far from the $70k. I'm assuming the temps would also get some pro-rated bonus, for example 50% if worked 50% of the time.

Also - remember that this is in a good economy (not "the greatest ever" like the president likes to say, but still an expansion, so good). Companies are supposed to make profits now, to have a cushion for the bad times, so they don't have to contract business immediately on the first sight of trouble.

You're being downed because suggesting that something socialism-related may not work in a circumstance is basically admitting you are a Nazi as far as people on these sites are concerned

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