

Revenue per employee in the computer industry - Maro
http://www.devdaily.com/business/revenue-per-employee-computer-services-industry

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TorKlingberg
I find these numbers are not so useful because they are artificially inflated
by outsourcing things like building maintenance. If the people actually
producing iPhones were Apple employees, their number would be much lower.
Profits per employee would say more, but can quickly turn zero or negative in
a bad year.

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wccrawford
Every company aims to keep costs low, employees count at a minimum, and
profits high. I don't see why these companies should be any different.

The companies that 'actually produce' the physical products have their own set
of numbers to worry about, too.

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_delirium
Revenue-per-employee doesn't tell you anything about "aim to keep costs low",
though, _only_ about keeping employee count low. You could improve your
revenue-per-employee figure by finding $100m of employees, firing them, and
then hiring an external firm for $200m to do the same job. All that's really
done though is just hidden the employees: they're now employees of another
firm, but they're still indirectly costing you $200m. To account for that, you
need a measure other than revenue-per-employee, like perhaps revenue-per-
dollar-spent.

It really tells you more about corporate structure than anything else.
Companies that do a lot of in-house work will do badly on the measure, while
companies that prefer to mostly pay others to handle large portions of their
work will do well--- regardless of which company manages to get the work done
cheaper.

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joe_bleau
Exactly!

Take it to an extreme: Berkshire Hathaway has 21 employees at the headquarters
('09 annual report), with revenue of about $130.22B (yahoo finance). How's
$6.2B / employee sound? Of course, if you add in the head count from the
subsidiaries, you're up to about 257,000 (again, '09 annual) and $506k /
employee.

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JimboOmega
Those of us working in the low revenue-per-employee companies really want to
work for the high revenue-per-employee companies. It also makes me wonder if
the high revenue-per-employee companies are getting the 10x value out of
employees that is oft mentioned (and debated).

Of course, revenue is misleading as others (Torklingberg, _delirium) have
pointed out, because it doesn't reflect cost.

What I am most interested in is the productivity per employee, which is rather
elusive.

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awongh
I wonder how much these figures are skewed by hiring practices at google, et.
al, where they tend to outsource a lot of non-tech jobs.... are all those
amazon people who pack boxes counted as employees? Maybe some of those figures
would be different depending on who you considered an employee.

I'd like to see an analysis of revenue per engineer......

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Maro
The fact that Apple and Google generate about $1.2 million in revenue per
employee is amazing.

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MikeCapone
I've seen a few specialty Property-Casualty insurance/reinsurance companies
that do better, but I don't know much about other industries, so I'm not sure
if it's common or not (probably not).

~~~
arethuza
I believe advertising companies can do better than this - I remember a friend
telling me where he worked they had 200 employees and a turnover of about $300
million.

