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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

This is going to lead to these abstract discussions of subjective perceptual "productivity" as it always does, but by the actual economic definition of labor productivity, revenue per employee, Microsoft has gone from $143 billion with 163,000 in 2020 ($877,000 per head) to $282 billion with 228,000 ($1.24 million per head) so far this year. They've become the 2nd largest company in the world by market cap, in large part specifically because Microsoft employees are so economically productive.

It says a lot about a team when they win, and instead of rewarding the players that got them the win, they do shit like this.

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How much of that is product engineering and how much is leasing access to capital during a GPU demand spike?

Why does it matter? You're just describing another case where losses get spread around but gains are claimed by those at the top.

Because the idea of productivity per employee its relevant to look at capital spending as well.

Otherwise people claim Microsoft is successful and hires well (with outsourcing or RTO or whatever), but in reality they are in a shift to a more capital intensive business.

That's a 14% difference when taking inflation into account.

Great point. MS employee productivity as measured has improved. But who cares about facts anymore.

This drove me nuts during all the hullabaloo about DOGE. People would confidently state that the Federal government is inefficient – while data showed the opposite! Federal workforce has remained largely the same since 1950, while administering more services, for more people, with a much larger budget. As measured, the government workforce is more productive than ever.

I'm sorry, but this is a meaningless stat when evaluating remote work productivity.

Microsoft is a huge company with a lot of momentum and so many products that you can't reasonably conclude anything about remote work from this stat alone. Worse, you don't even account for inflation (!).

What about revenue per employee before covid? What if I chose any arbitrary time period in the last 20 years? Lastly, maybe revenue per employee could've grown significantly more during 2020-2024 if everyone was in the office?

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