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If that’s $260M pa for 1500 employees then that works out as $40k revenue per employee per quarter.

Compare with APPL and FB doing [correction: over $600k] per employee per quarter.

Not a value judgment. But I only recently started noticing these numbers and it really puts the big players’ spending power into perspective. Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.

Edit: thanks for the corrections in the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.

I think a lot of startups could be a little more lean than they are right now.

> Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.

That seems to be changing, as the employees at those companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".

>Compare with APPL and FB doing $2.5M per employee per quarter.

your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.

I'm guessing that was a typo and he meant per year since the comparison number was also annual revenue.

Does this account for how much those companies offload to contractors / staffing agencies?

I don’t know. I do know that “number of employees” metric is a shorthand way of measuring the operational weight of an organisation. As long as it is measured consistently, it’s a good proxy for size-of-tech-company. It might not work so well when comparing a pharmaceutical manufacturer to a main st retailer though.

Depends if you count Facebook's moderators, Uber's drivers, Apple's shop assistants, Netflix's film crews and so on.

Some of these measures make it look like Google's zero-customer-support approach is the 'efficient' way to run a business but for a lot of companies it'd be a false economy.

The economy of scale - at FAANG(MAANG?) scale you can have extremely efficient money making features that only takes a few engineer to support thousands.

For things that are completely software, it does not surprise me that millions per employee in earnings is realized - that's just what happens when you operate at that scale. And that's accounting for all of the overhead in personnel that scale entails.

Given recent name changes, MAANG works, but it can be MANGA or MAGNA now.

I like "MAGNAM" if you include Microsoft.

Ahem, and the G stands for Alphabet? :)

If F => M then doesn't G => A? Which is good, we don't want to have to go around calling them MAGNA!

Every one of the Facebook companies is a household name with hundreds of millions of users. The same cannot be said for the Alphabet companies aside from Google.

YouTube and Fitbit come to mind

Both are subsidiaries of Google, not Alphabet.

Chromecast Android ChromeOS

I think Oculus is much more similar to Stadia than something else too.

Additionally, all of those platforms you mention du the same thing: chat and share pics.

You listed three Google products. Those are not alphabet companies. No one is trying to say Google is smalltime. Rather the point is, “Meta as an entity is comparable to Google, not Alphabet because it’s Units are Interesting”

I listed 4 actually, all with their OWN household name with plenty of users.

Under the Google umbrella or alphabet is the same. Just like under Facebook or Meta.

Nobody cares about the exact legal construction of those products. Plenty of people still say FANG, where it's short for Google and not Alphabet.

Nice nitpick, but you obviously mispositioned your initial comment by putting the emphasis on household names and not on the legal structure, which is a strange argument fyi.

Oculus does not have hundreds of million users.

You prefer MAAAN?

While I'm doing a low-content post, here's a tangential fun fact: the Latin sequence "gn" (as in, say, "magna cum laude") was pronounced with the G nasalized. If magna were rendered in English spelling, it'd be "mangna". (Or, well, "mongna".)

I can’t believe there was a time where Microsoft wasn’t considered as big of a tech company as Netflix.

It wasn’t about size but about fast appreciating tech stocks. This was pre cloud boom MSFT

Exactly. Ten years ago people thought of MSFT more like INTC or IBM than GOOGL or AMZN

You shouldn't believe it; there never was such a time.

True. The number of engineers is not linearly correlated with the number of customers, but the number of features. If you have a relatively simple product and you can somehow still compete (niche market, patents etc), you can get away with a very low head count. WhatsApp famously had only 35 engineers and ~450M users when Facebook acquired them.

If they wanted, they can expand easily to a lot more - which is probably what happened to them inside facebook anyways.

Even then, they can still be insanely profitable per engineer.

> which is probably what happened to them inside facebook anyways

I think initially they only expanded to ~50 engineers until 900M users. Even today they are estimated to have only ~500 employees (no idea what percentage of that are engineers).

LinkedIn lists 1823 people working at Whatsapp, not sure how accurate that number is, probably self-reported so could be lower/higher, but ~500 seems off. Employee count seems to grow 1-5% month-to-month.

Engineering is listed as 25% of those 1823, operations 8%, education 6% and business development 6%.

OT: if you want to start with M, then the correct name would be MAANA

They have lots of contractors though , ppl that censor posts, etc. You're probably not taking them into consideration.

One might argue that those are costs, not head count. By the same logic we can also assume that they use contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's.

I guess a somewhat better metric would be "profit per employee" instead of revenue.

"contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's"

Clearly keeping facebook platform from breaking the law on childporn is pretty central to their business, but pizza is not

Maybe. But the point is, ad absurdum, you can do business with zero employees and all contractors, or with zero contractors and all employees. It's not possible to measure efficiency with a simple "revenue over employee count" metric.

Point stands, but I'm not sure how you get that much for FB and AAPL. In 2020 (4 quarters) they made, per employee, ~$1.2M and $0.7M in gross profit, $1.5M and $1.9M in revenue. I didn't cross check the table but did get the same number for FB.

https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278...

> 1500+ employees

According to LinkedIn the average tenure of employees is a little over a year (likely to hit the vesting cliff and bounce).

Two months ago they didn't have the staff to review pull requests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849

You can love the product, but investors are ultimately betting on the company - which seems shaky.

> According to LinkedIn the average tenure of employees is a little over a year (likely to hit the vesting cliff and bounce).

I think this is usually the case for fast growing companies that typically double employees every year, because:

1/2 people avg. 1/2 year tenure

1/4 people avg. 3/2 year tenure

1/8 people avg. 5/2 year tenure

etc. Which approaches something around ~1 year tenure. You'll notice the same 1.1 year tenure at Stripe, Affirm, etc.

An additional data point (read: anecdote): I applied for a job at Hashicorp in early July of this year. I have yet to receive any reply, including a "thanks but no thanks"

For reference, I also have a friend who applied there in late 2019; he apparently _did_ get a "thanks but no thanks" email about a month later.

Perhaps all of the company is short-staffed, rather than just engineering.

I've applied to plenty of much larger and established companies without getting a thanks but no thanks.

Twitter has the audacity to email a year after my application to let me know that I was "still under consideration."

Google ended my hiring loop by having my emails to my recruiter bounce.

So this is not just a shaky company problem.

My Twitter experience:

Applied, rejected within a day, got an email from a hiring manager four weeks later asking me to re-apply, very sorry etc etc, bad screener he had to look over everything again.

I re-apply, two interviews, asked to do a presentation and then a video on strategic threats to the org, spent two days of my holiday doing it (tight schedule from Twitter), sent, no reply for two weeks, get an email back saying they wanted it to be more tactical.

I pointed out what they said (it needs to be strategic), they come back two weeks later, very sorry etc, they would love to move me to next stage, one week later hiring manager doesn't turn up for interview, two days later apologises, asks me to meet with his senior manager in two weeks. I agree.

Recruiter then turns around and says, sorry not what they are looking for. No other explanation. Next day emails me asking would I apply for another position. I say, "Hmmm not so sure. Perhaps. What's the comp?" He says "Great, I think you will fit well. I will go check it." Then ghosted...

Was a cool role. But still. I'm in a position were I am also interviewing the people on the other side of the table. I'd love to have helped build something they needed about that fusion and analysis.

But sorry, in that context, just not good enough. That's my first dealing with your company. Why should I trust anything else will be better?

Hahaha Twitter in Seattle at least is infamous for experiences like this from my acquaintances and friends. I somehow got into an on-site there once only to find that the team I’m interviewing for doesn’t unit test anything or write any Scala, they’re not familiar with consistent hashing, and a bunch of other curious things that contradict what I had been told about the job and the company.

contact their head of hr/recruitment.

I took an offer elsewhere. Twitter would have been fun as Mudge was invoked with that team.

Seems like they’ve never improved their process. I was put through an interview gauntlet and then ignored. The experience prompted lively discussion three years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697

New HN entry for the updated blog post link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29116611

it is common for pre-ipo companies to reduce expenses they can avoid, temporarily, without hitting revenue, so numbers look better

Also few people i know that use terraform like it. HCL is really clunky when compared to typescript or python (pulumi or CDK or bicep)

Not until switching to pulumi, did I realize Terraform is a lot more polished and simpler to read/use.

> I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?

news.ycombinator.com needs a ycombinator.com/topcompanies equivalent.

> I mean I felt it wasn't that long ago Vagrant was "the" tool for the job.

Vagrant is my safety hatch, in case Docker goes under and aspect of it that's "the best centralized, cross-distro, server-oriented Linux package manager repository around" is, at least temporarily, thrown into disarray. Back to picking a distro and contorting it into what I need, in that case.

And it's still better than Docker if you're really in a hurry and need to get some pile of undocumented shit running locally ASAP.

Docker at this point is just a wrapper around OCI spec… why would you go back to Vagrant rather than just using any of the other tools that can build OCI images? Vagrant and Docker seem like fundamentally different tools to me.

At least 80% of Docker's value to me is as a consistent-everywhere, very complete server daemon package manager. Serious packages for work? They're there, and up-to-date. Screwing-around stuff for home (Minecraft server, Jellyfin, et c.)? It's all there, same interface, just a couple minutes to add and configure another daemon at approximately its latest version, and I don't even have to think about which distro I'm running.

It's the container registry that I'd miss, not the actual container functionality, and that's what would have me reaching for Vagrant and distro packages again until something similarly good arose (or maybe there already is a viable replacement, which I'd find via search in short order if I actually needed it)

I wonder what sort of container registry are you looking for. There are a few alternatives to Docker Hub nowadays. For instance, GCP’s is quite affordable and straightforward.

I don't mean for hosting custom images—I mean for using it as a cross-distro (indeed, cross-OS) very up-to-date, server-oriented package manager. That's most of what I get out of it, right now. It's currently, maybe, my favorite Linux package manager + package repository, even if that's not its core purpose.

You could, for instance, use Podman and Quay.io for your purposes and you would never need to touch anything Docker.

Vagrant can use containers, making it also a wrapper around OCI-compatible runtimes. In addition, it also supports VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMWare, bare metal, SSH targets, and various cloud providers.

The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?

I wasn't aware that Vagrant has Podman integration! That's pretty cool.

My point was not to defend Docker, but to suggest that Docker is increasingly irrelevant to the broader ecosystem.

I wouldn't use Vagrant because I (like many people) always target an orchestrator and not hypervisor or bare metal.

> The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?

I use Docker as a nigh-universal package repository and package manager, with a huge and up-to-date selection of packages. It gives me a consistent way to run daemons my software depends on, nearly everywhere, including pinning the version and ensuring they all use the same config. It's docker-hub, really, that provides most of the value I get from Docker on a day-to-day basis, and that's the part I'd miss. I know there are other ways to create images and run containers, but I almost never create—or even modify—them myself.

Vagrant also supports running workloads in Docker containers rather than virtual machines (vagrant up --provider docker)

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/providers/docker/basics

>Mitchell was still on HN yesterday, as he was replying something about Backblaze IPO and its business. Today it is his IPO

Maybe that is because he stepped down from leadership to become an IC again? We could speculate that he didn't want to go public, or had no desire to do the S-1 work so he stepped down.

> I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?

There are only a few places where you can easily promote your saas company, it makes sense that Saas startups that IPO now were promoted when they launched ...

> Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?

Let's not make whether a company went public a metric for assessing quality. Going public is mostly a matter of how much a company expects the public to pay to get a share for the company. Also, it is a matter of how much the bank which facilitates the offering expects to make. Currently, the markets are sky high, so even not so good companies will make crazy amounts of money for the bank and the company which went public. Just look at the dot com bubble and the IPOs for more information.

I think it's funny and fitting that his eponymous company made Consul and Vault and his personal website doesn't do TLS.

Bigger fish to fry. I wish I had that level of focus!

Freshworks started by a HN comment [0] and now they went public. [1]

[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28625195

Where can I see $10B valuation to confirm?

Sorry I think it should be seeking $10B according to Yahoo / Bloomberg.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hashicorp-files-u-ipo-said-18...

2100 customers seems low? I've personally worked for 3 companies in the last 3 years who had Vault Enterprise licenses, and in the grand scheme of things, these are pretty small companies in a single, pretty small country (Belgium)

Here's one for PagerDuty (second YC company to IPO) from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653

coinbase one is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403

Oh wow I know the citrusbyte people, I didnt know about this!