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Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

All you have to do is take the company's rev/profit and divide it by the number of employees (factoring in how much you pay an employee)

So yeah if MSFT can make 3 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, and Google makes 1 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, then 1 MSFT eng is worth 3 of Googles (simplified - obv business involves sales, marketing, etc)

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That's not a measure of how much work engineers are doing. It's a measure of how effective the company is at making money from the work their engineers are doing.

Right. Consider how different the profit of a company hiring $300,000/yr software engineers to mow lawns 8 hours per day might be, compared with another company hiring them to... write extremely valuable software 4 hours per day.

The company with (let's say) identically-skilled employees putting in twice as many hours probably won't be the more profitable of the two.

Replace "mow lawns" with "write pointless, doomed-from-the-start messaging apps" and the actual problem starts to become clear.

Or more exactly how much work the engineers have done in past and how big moat the management or luck have build... Sometimes I really wonder how much the current employees contribute in companies like MS, Google and Meta...

Is that really an accurate way of measuring anyways? Company A may just have a more complex product and need more developers. Doesn't mean Company A should just remove developers since Company B doesn't need that amount for their unrelated product.

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