
Profit per Employee at Tech Companies Compared to Other Industries - dorictemple
http://theonda.org/articles/2009/05/15/there-are-tech-companies-and-then-there-are-tech-companies
======
pg
FWIW, this is erosion happening. There aren't, fortunately, that many
differences between hn/news and hn/classic, but this is one. A lightweight
post that has been voted up almost entirely by accounts less than a year old.
I'm not sure what to do about these. It's not offtopic enough to kill, but it
doesn't deserve to be ranked #2, as it currently is.

The good news is, these are fortunately still quite rare. If they become more
common I suppose I'll finally have to implement vote weighting.

~~~
dorictemple
Hi Paul,

I apologize for submitting this article. If it is viewed by the community as
sub-par or unworthy please know it was unintentional. My thought was that this
take on the article helped put the numbers into perspective relative to other
classes of trade. It probably would have made a better comment than
submission.

I have a huge respect for what has been created at HN and though my account is
less than a year old I've been reading for far longer.

Two thoughts on things that could be done other than weighting (which I'm
actually a fan of).

1\. I would make this guideline a bit more explicit "Please submit the
original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another
site, submit the latter. -- Reference replies to the primary source in
comments unless the analysis is equal to or greater in quality than the
original"

2\. Create a 2 column approach for comments with "new" on the right and
sequential, or popular on the left. This would help some comments get a fair
hearing in heavily threaded stories.

However neither suggestion will take the place of a strong community. Thanks
for calling me out.

~~~
pg
Don't worry about that. The problem is not so much that it got submitted-- all
kinds of stuff gets submitted-- but that it got so many votes so rapidly.
Could just be a random statistical outlier, come to that.

~~~
andrewljohnson
If you aren't yet treating the community like they will aggressively abuse and
spam the system, I think you should start.

Are you looking at any other information about how this story got voted up so
fast? I haven't looked at the HN code at all, but I wonder if there is
anything sophisticated for stopping people from colluding and spamming. Do
these accounts come from the same geographic area? ISP? Do they vote like each
other in the past?

Vote-weighting doesn't even really seem like it's going to be the solution to
the problem. Well, it might end up being the solution if you give a great deal
of weight to trusted accounts, but you might in the end discourage new users
from contributing.

I think maybe you consider attacking spammers head on. I really don't think
the problem is a bunch of newbies up-voted this story. HN is just easy to
game.

~~~
dorictemple
Andrew,

You see spam on HN, but it is hard to believe this is a case. The story about
profit per company had been up for about 10 hrs by the time I posted. A
respected blogger with impeccable tech/startup credentials (founder of Tabblo
acquired by HP) posted a thoughtful reply showing how poor PPE was at some
large tech companies relative to other companies. It is related and
interesting, if a bit mislocated.

------
Dilpil
Goldman Sachs is an interesting case: in 2007, it made above a 3 million per
employee profit. Of course, not quite as hot this year. But you can see why
young people are so interested in finance.

------
russell
You will learn that Exxon is 300 times more profitable per employee than
Starbucks.

The original article has more hitech companies
[http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-
google-s...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-
staff-210k-in-profit-per-head-in-2008/)

------
socratees
As of 2007, NTT DoCoMo had a higher profit per employee than Exxon Mobil. Look
at the report. <http://www.massmac.org/newsline/0707/McKinsey.pdf>

