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Comment by devops000 | Hacker News Reader

It's a cultural legacy of the old businesses that were human intensive. Now there is a lot of use of technology that is harder to see from the outside. Clearly those who judge a technology startup by the number of people indicate a low understanding of the scaling capabilities provided by technology.

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Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm still amazed that Microsoft, with 144,000 employees, still has a revenue per employee of $932,000! What a monster business!

What you really want to look at is net income per employee, which for MSFT is around $415k. Compare to Amazon with is iirc around $50k (just goes to show why software-first businesses are so attractive to investors)

depends how much net income is being reduced by capital investment costs... for example amazon has been bootstrapping its own version of fedex. They could probably raise net income in the short term by just using existing carriers, but they clearly think long-term profits will be improved by burning money on rolling out an entire internal logistics org.

Microsoft has a lot of vendors and contractors that aren’t technically employees but are, in an abstract sense, part of their workforce and payroll.

Amazon also has a lot of contractors, but IIRC most of their warehouse employees (the vast majority by number) are FTE. Also I think Amazon has many multiples of Microsoft’s “employees” as a result.

For sure software has big margins but I think there is a lot of nuance lost when looking at these gameable FTE counts

That's why you look at net income and not revenue

You can find something similar in consulting businesses:

- Mckinsey Revenue: $10.B, Employees: 30.000 -> Revenue per employee: $333K

- Accenture Revenue: $50B, Employees: 674,000 -> Revenue per employee: $74K

I think this just shows how underpaid so many people at Accenture must be. You figure out of nearly 3/4 of a million employees, they must have several hundred, maybe a thousand or more executives making $200-500k/yr in salary. There must be a ton of consultants doing the grunt work for $30-50k to make that feasible.

Given that Accenture does a ton of outsourcing, I'd imagine it is a magnitude less than $30-50k.

Microsoft has a lot of vendors and contractors. I’d be curious to see how the number changes when you include, say, everybody with an active @microsoft.com email.

Pedantry, but vendors at Microsoft have an @microsoft.com email, the username is just prefixed with v-.

That is what I meant. Include everybody at Microsoft with an internal email as a “worker” to capture people like vendors and contractors along with employees

Oh yes, gotcha, I misread it as the opposite. Indeed if you include vendors and contractors the average per “employee” would certainly go way down.

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