Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?

yourfairshare.info

17 pointsIESAI_ski30 comments

It just says the same thing regardless of what I enter:

1 million annual:

> If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $1.049.283. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.

3 million annual:

> If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $3.049.283. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.

1 dollar per year:

> If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $49.284. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.

Good catch, thanks! That was a locale bug. If your browser is set to a European locale, the number formatting was using periods instead of commas. Just pushed a fix, should be live in a minute or two.

You're right that the per-employee share is the same regardless of salary. That's the point: it shows what the company made per head, and then what your salary would look like with that added on top. The salary input just personalizes it.

I found that confusing personally, seems like it's just unnecessary and just seeing the raw number that you're missing out on would be easier to reason about.

Dividing profits by employee count and calling this "fair share" is ludicrous. It exhibits a childish understanding of the world and the economy. If you believe that you're cheated, and you are creating significantly more value than you're paid, start your own single-person company and sell your services to others.

The truth is that by working for a company, you get access to environment that makes you much more productive than you'd otherwise be on your own. You also are not on the hook for most of the risks. It is patently unfair, and extremely short-sighted, to claim that investors deserve no compensation for their investment.

I agree, if you think you're being cheated you should thinkg about starting your own company. Startups are much better on this. I definitely disagree with the idea that workers don't take on the risks. Workers get fired, relocated, their compensation gets changed, etc etc.

> I definitely disagree with the idea that workers don't take on the risks.

When $employer beats or misses targets, that affects my bonus (which is formalized for only the higher pay bands, probably on the theory that we can actually have some individual impact somehow) but not my base salary which is actually the vast majority of what I'm paid.

Risk isn't zero, but it's far less than what the equity holders see.

Implying people are cheated is a nice way to increase dissatisfaction, if the goal is to produce resentment.

I'm all for unions and collective bargaining but I'm not a fan of manipulated dissatisfaction.

Access to many of the companies I worked for allowed me to support their monopolies just like desktop bundling (MS), pay store fees(AAPL), search advertising (GOOG), and so on. I guess you could call that "more productive"?

It's probably easier to understand this concept if you forget about tech, and think about something like steel mill, or a mine. If you want to make money as a worker making steel, if you just start doing it in your backyard by yourself, you'll produce very little steel in an hour of your labor. If, instead, you obtain access to enormous, capital-intensive machinery, by joining a pre-established company that owns a blast furnace, and has pre-existing business relationships with ore and fuel suppliers, the hour of your labor will be made much more productive. You will be producing a lot of value by working in a steel mill, but only because the pre-existing capital investment, and process organization will enable you to do so. Therefore, the business will contribute to your productivity in an enormous way, making the idea that the profits are entirely your own contribution just silly.

The same is, of course, true about Google or Apple. Working at Apple will make it much easier for you to be productive than working at your own company. The nice thing about our industry is that the latter, while more difficult, is actually possible -- unlike steel mill workers, software engineers don't need as much capital investment, and can run highly successful companies that employ just one or a handful of people. It's just hard and risky to try that, hence people prefer to pretend that the productivity enabled by working as part of established, successful company is entirely due to their own merit.

On the other side: without the workers, those large capital investments are useless lumps of metal.

Both Capital and Labour invest in the company, in different ways. It's not at all clear to me that the optimal arrangement is that Capital reaps the bulk of the return from those investments.

This is literally opposite of the truth. In almost all businesses, the wages constitutes higher share of revenues than profits.

The value of a business isn't its wages or its immediate profits: it (over-simplified) represents a claim on the future profits.

Equity grants (and especially options) aren't particularly controversial in tech, and I'm not saying they're the answer to the problem at hand. But they're a mechanism for allowing workers to share in the gain from their investment. All the problems (especially with US tax treatment of options) notwithstanding.

OK so you avoid my answer and resort to "teaching me the concept" as if disagreement means misunderstanding.

The concept here is that you are cherry picking non-average companies.

And you are straw manning alternatives.

So, I disagree.

Which risks?

Mega corps have access to guaranteed bailout by governments as they're considered National Security concern, plus massive lobbying departments to buy all the laws they need to favor themselves over most potential competitors both external and internal, plus massive legal departments with experts at twisting the laws they didn't manage to buy yet into meaning whatever they want them to mean.

And after all that socialism-for-the-rich, any remaining risk is transferred directly to their employees in the form of lay offs, coupled with non-compete clauses that forbid the most competent, for months to years, from working at their core area of expertize, plus arbitration clauses that forbid them from seeking relief at the actual courts. Clauses that are enforced by the courts due to the aforementioned lobbying and purchased laws.

I recently learned that the CEO of the holding company that owns my employer made several hundred million dollars last year...while my coworkers and I are told to stop asking for raises (I've had approximately ONE since 2020 and the cost of living has never stopped increasing).

Pain.

I thought the labor theory of value wasn't much of a thing any more?

Its big in left academic circles.

Don't these guys all, or mostly all, maintain massive shadow workforces of employees who do all of the work of employees but are called contractors, and so get poor benefits packages and no stock and inflate the earnings of the companies?

Don't know why you got flagged into oblivion, but it's a noble effort. Some of the numbers you'll see in tech companies should seriously give one pause and thinking not only about where that income does come from, but also how the business works. I've personally left workplaces on such realizations.

On second thought, that might be why you attracted flags. Can't be getting the help having thoughts above their station here it seems. Keep up the good work.

Yeah, I'm not sure either! I'm pretty new to HN and don't have much activity on my account beyond the worker-owned co-op directory I posted a couple weeks ago, so I'm guessing that's what triggered it. Totally my fault for not being more of an active community member first. I emailed the mods to ask. Just psyched about these projects and wanted to connect with people who might find them interesting.

Temporarily embarrassed billionaires can be a tough crowd.

Not even talking about the actual content on the website, OP - why are all of your comments here LLM-generated?

It's extremely clear you're not writing those yourself, which makes the whole thing very disingenuous if you can't engage with others in your own language.

I've worked for top... 10? Silicon Valley companies that you most definitely know. Two major ones. I would sometimes do napkin math, like once a year, to see if I was actually worth my salary. I usually was way ahead but when I wasnt sure I pivoted, just out of pride really. I always had this image of me working for startups where every dollar mattered even though I wasn't.

I built the worker-owned co-op directory that was on here a couple weeks ago (https://workerowned.info). This is the other side of that coin: what do workers actually generate for owners at big public companies?

You type in your company and your salary. It pulls net income and headcount from SEC 10-K filings and shows what each employee's equal share of the profit would be, and what your salary would look like with it added on.

I know equal-split is a simplification, not a compensation model. It ignores capex, R&D, risk-adjusted returns, and a lot else. But "Walmart made $22 billion" is abstract. "$10,000 per employee" is not. That's the whole point.

You can also browse all ~940 companies ranked by profit per employee (https://yourfairshare.info/browse), or by industry (https://yourfairshare.info/industry) which breaks out buybacks and dividends per worker alongside it.

Static site, no accounts, no tracking. All from SEC filings.

The site is called "Your Fair Share," which is provocative, I know. But the point isn't to tell you what your fair share is. It's to give you a simple calculation that makes you start wondering what it should be. That's a conversation worth having, even if reasonable people will land in very different places.

Some caveats since this crowd will rightly push on them:

1. Net income is after taxes, interest, and a lot of accounting choices. It's not "profit the company hid from workers." It's what they reported to the SEC after everything else.

2. Equal split is a hypothetical that puts the number on a per-person scale. Nothing more.

3. Capital-intensive industries (airlines, utilities, manufacturing) look less dramatic because margins are thin relative to headcount. Most interesting for high-margin businesses.

4. I've verified the top ~200 companies against primary sources (10-K filings, press releases, EDGAR XBRL). The long tail has gaps. There's a data feedback link on every result.

> Some caveats since this crowd will rightly push on them

Maybe you should start by not writing your HN posts with an LLM..

that's me saying "this crowd" like.. you guys... and you guys are pushing back... heh should have left the typos in

Sorry, but gaslighting others that you haven't used an LLM to write your comments when you obviously have is incredibly dishonest.

oh sorry to be unclear. u highlighted something i said. but to clear, i def use LLMs to help with bad writing and code. i am all for people using tools that help them. ill try to be cleaner about it

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

So all companies should just fully divide their profits, totally equally, among employees, so shareholders get nothing. So why would anyone ever invest in companies in the first place? Why would employees have an incentive to work hard if they all get an equal share of profits.

Look, I wholly agree that there are many things that need fixing in the American version of capitalism, but lord, this ain't it.

I admit I'm trying to be a little provocative here. But to be clear, that's not what the tool is arguing. It doesn't say companies should do what you are saying. It takes a big abstract number and puts it on a per-person scale so you can actually feel the size of it. I don't know how much profit should go to buybacks an dividends and workers, but we need the numbers to have the discussion.

"$22 billion in profit" means nothing to most people. "$10,000 per employee" does. That's it. The tool is a framing device, not a policy proposal.

What you do with that number is up to you. Maybe you think the current split is fair. Maybe you think you should ask for a raise. Maybe you just find it interesting. All fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com