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Comment by spiralganglion | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting data I pulled together today:

Approximate revenue-per-employee. Data from Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia.

Apple makes $2,000,000 per employee. Facebook makes $1,500,000. Google makes $1,000,000. Microsoft makes $800,000. Sony makes $500,000. Kraft makes $400,000. Walmart makes $200,000. McDonalds makes $60,000.

Now, if only there was a good source of users-per-engineer. I read that Facebook is somewhere around 1,260,000. That's just awesome.

We create so much value, and for so many people.

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Of course, these are interesting and great numbers, but I don't think that they are the only measure of value.

McDonalds may make 'only' $60,000 per employee, but it employs over 1.5 million people. I'm grateful that McDs are providing jobs for those who need them. They also of course offer opportunities for people to own franchises and run their 'own' businesses

The 1.5 million you cite includes franchised employees, while the 60K revenue/employee number does not.

Instagram has 3 engineers[1], 9 million users[2]: 3 million users per engineer.

[1] (counting the co-founders as engineers) http://www.crunchbase.com/company/instagram [2] http://www.kullin.net/2011/09/instagram-now-has-9-million-us...

And, unless I'm mistaken, a revenue hovering around $0.

That's the hacker spirit.

The first rule of the bubble is you don't talk about things that might make it pop.

Personally, I'm on pins and needles waiting to see if it will.

I know people like Instagram because of the filters and such, but is it cool otherwise? I mean, I've got it installed on my phone, but I hardly ever take pictures with my iPhone (3GS, maybe that explains it?) in the first place.

Mozilla used to welcome each employee with a little knicknack and say, "This represents your million users. Try not to abuse them too much."

But not anymore? :(

I don't know, I heard it in an old interview with Aza Raskin, who doesn't even work there anymore. They might still do it :)

I hope you mean users-per-engineer. :-)

Oh, seems that Facebook makes 1.2 dollars per user from your numbers

Thanks for the correction.

As for Facebook's revenue-per-user based on revenue-per-employee and number of users, you'll need the number of employees (not just engineers). That's about 2000, which works out to $4 per user. This is exactly inline with what was documented in this nifty chart: http://wallstcheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/chart...

Amazon is kicking ass. Apple only makes $150 revenue per iOS user (Asymco).

Wow, amazon really does kick ass.

I think saving money on designers can be justified, after all ;-)

Why should we be surprised that the company whose business is in shipping and selling a wide range of physical products has more revenue than a range of companies whose income are either service fees or advertisements? We're not comparing like with like; Amazon's revenue is counted against by buying and stocking the physical products they sell to derive that revenue. None of the others on that chart have physical product to worry about and so retain a much higher percentage of revenue for themselves.

By profit margin, Apple is a lot closer to the purely software companies than it is to the likes of the (nearly identical) Walmart and Amazon.

http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin#compCos=AMZN...

I'd love to see where Adobe or Oracle would fit in on that chart.

> Apple makes $2,000,000 per employee.

Most of their employees are not engineers, but work in retail. Which makes it a bit of an odd case among the other tech companies :)

Does the cited figure actually include every employee at every Apple store? Or just corporate employees?

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