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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, that is about the stated revenue on their Wikipedia page. Divided equally among their 20,000 employees, that comes to $350,000 per employee. Expenses like office space, taxes, fines/fees, inflated executive compensation, etc will bring that down quite a bit; though other sources of income will bring it back up too. Sounds reasonable.

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I wonder what 20,000 Employees are doing there though. I know saying "I could do that with 10 people, what are they even doing" is a meme here, but I really can't make a good guess what the employees are actually doing. Risk assessment, looking for new investment opportunities, regulatory paperwork, marketing? 20,000 is a lot of people.

One way to get a hint at what kind of work employees do is by looking at open job postings: https://www.vanguardjobs.com/job-search-results

Nice link, thank you!

I imagine they have actual customer service. But maybe I'm naive?

In what situation would you contact them? Aren’t basically all possible problems you could have something you would contact your broker for?

Vanguard is also a broker.

Right, you are hinting at the angle that other commenters have pointed at, which is that Vanguard runs a fund management business (which is what the article is about) but also runs a brokerage, does 401k/403b/529 administration, has an advisory business, etc. The total employee count refers to employees working across all those business units, and that includes a lot of customer service, regulatory, back office, etc.

How many people is ideal to look after $10,000,000,000,000 in assets? Some bloat is definitely necessary at these mind-boggling numbers, and assets-per-employee is still half a billion.

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