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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

That Apple is on the list and Amazon is not is a bit irking to me. Since they're clearly counting Amazon's fulfillment employees, but I doubt they're counting for example apple store employees, or the half of Foxconn which is basically Apple.

That is to say, this data can be massaged.

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They do include Apple retail employees.

Updated: 116k employees, 215.6 billion USD in revenue.

Ah, my mistake. Even still I think the bigger issue is that Amazon includes fulfillment employees, whereas Apple (a hardware company, by most accounts) does not employ anyone in hardware production, instead contracting that work out.

Of course that leads to a bit of a slippery slope ("why not only count the AWS team"), but I still think its an important note.

According to this article, Amazon has $101,749 in revenue per employee (which is almost 2x that of Wal-Mart). That's roughly 1/18th what Apple's doing.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/26/amazon-generates-t...

That's not a comparable metric. That is only going by a single quarter instead of the whole year, which is important when you factor in the holidays at the end of the year. Last year Amazon's revenue was around 136 billion and it had around 341k employees, so the revenue per employee was around $400k

Oops, you're right: didn't realize the article was using quarterly numbers!

would revenu per engineer be better?

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