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I think it's more like 1 employee makes 10M net revenue, and 9 employees coast on their success.

The theory is that the superstar employee needs the support form 9 others to achieve the success.

As an example, a super star programmer, requires support from DevOps, QA, PM, EM, UX, Docs to deliver the great results. Alone not a super star anymore.

To reuse and refocus an old quote: 50% of those people are probably useless. The problem is figuring out which ones.

You can find out easily - when an employee leaves and you see a huge productivity drop, you'll know. (Also the opposite happens: you fire a bad manager and productivity goes up.)

I coin the long paid vacation hack

> The problem is figuring out which ones.

To be more precise: figuring out which ones are useless may cost more time/money/effort than you would save by removing them.

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