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Comment by arnon | Hacker News Reader

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arnon

Revenue is nice but revenue-per-full-time-employee is a more meaningful metric.

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Feel free to add that value, this is a public forum

Revenue in 2021: 33,671 M USD

Revenue in 2022: 32,165 M USD

FTEs in 2021: 71,970

FTEs in 2022: 86,482

Revenue-per-FTE in 2021: $467,847

Revenue-per-FTE in 2022: $371,927

That's 21% less revenue per FTE.

[1] 2022 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

[2] 2021 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

It's 21% less but also those are quarterly numbers that you are showing.

Yes and Facebook probably has about as many contractors as they do FTEs, but that number fluctuates without making the news…meaning total effective payroll at Facebook is extremely shadowy

meaningful for profitability, but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society.

Society should get rid of computers and construction equipment then. Everyone can have a lot more employees.

No need to get rid of computers and backhoes. You don’t have to have work in order to have employees. At least that’s what the parent seems to be implying

Construction is actually one of the few sectors that hasn't become more productive per employee over past decades. Buildings have become vastly more complicated but there's comparably little automation.

You might be interested in these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdIvnIUw0tE

Not sure whether this is more common in the US these days. I know for a fact that a lot of buildings in China are constructed this way.

But did you notice how many construction workers are shown there? You can certainly build faster with prefab, but it's still a very manual process, both at the factory and on the construction site. And anything afterwards (wiring, HVAC, painting) is also nearly 100% manual labor.

It seems we've made amazing progress on the "software" side of AI, but are still very far behind on the "hardware" side, ie robots.

I'm aware it's still a very labor intensive process. But there seems to be great potential for improvement with Tesla-esque automation processes if the capital investments are worth it.

The main disadvantage about physical objects vs software is that physical objects are not as easily scalable and matter is generally more expensive than bits... so the economy of scale is harder to exploit. But give it some years once the marginal utility of software decreases to a point, I think people will divert more focus (and more importantly capital) on automating hardware stuff.

I mean that employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children.

As opposed to some dystopia where an exceptionally efficient and low employee organisation makes all the money and there is no/limited distribution of that wealth.

The tech companies such as Meta that pay good wages and have good working conditions are able to do so because they are exceptionally efficient and require a relatively low number of employees to generate the outsize profits they do.

So that “dystopia” can already be considered to be here.

sure, but I merely wish to mention it within the context of "having high profit to employee ratio is good".

Everything has trade-offs.

> but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society.

that is how the Soviet Union worked...they just cut to the chase and had the state employ everyone directly

strange how an economy can fail with full employment...

I used to live in the Soviet Union so I am well aware of its failings. Rather I mean that if a one-man shop makes all the money in the world then that can be also problematic. Employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children.

Maybe employment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the goal is to build automation to the point that the moral imperative to labor isn’t as imperative.

Oh, you optimist, I like you!

In real life the goal will be to build automation so that the few owners of the robots can buy more 200m long yachts.

No, they get the 200m yachts for building the capability first. There will come a time on our trajectory that artificial scarcity is such an obvious canard that we will move past it into a post scarcity world. I don’t know how it’ll be constructed, but the need to work being a moral imperative will necessarily fall away as it becomes obvious it’s not necessary nor imperative nor moral. I think this is unavoidable, sans some sort of plateau or limiting factor or regression, and the rate of change I see makes it look like we aren’t far away - although the realization of that the wizard is just a man behind the curtain may be.

You do realize that they managed to build artificial scarcity in virtual worlds through licenses, DMCA, NFTs? And morality or progress are not given under any circumstances.

And that’s why Zuck is wrong. The reality we exist in is not constrained by human constructs.

Yeah I realize progress or morality isn’t a given - I think I mentioned the offroads. But if things keep going in this direction we are heading now, I suspect we might actually get there.

If people are not working, they will have significantly more time to observe, evaluate and perish forbid, succeed in changing the state of their communities, fellow citizens and elected leadership.

Inflation adjusted revenue per employee even more so

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