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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Garry, where do you get that figure of $1.6 million per employee per year in profit for Google, please?

In Q2 2019 Alphabet (GOOGL), Google's parent, made $9.81 billion in profit[1].

At the end of the previous quarter, they reportedly had 103,549 employees[2].

Doing the division yields $88,654 profit per employee in Q2 2019.

Doing the naive thing of multiplying that by 4, which I know will be somewhat off, gives $354,615 profit per employee per year.

That's a tidy sum, but only a quarter of what you claimed so, again, can you tell us where you got that figure, please?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/25/google-al...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/tech/alphabet-q1-earnings...

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He probably confused profits and revenue.

Could be: Google's annual revenue for 2018 was $136.22 billion[1], which yields $1,315,512 revenue per employee.

Controlling for employee growth from 2018 to 2019 (they only had 85,050 employees at the end of Q1 2018[2]) and assuming linear growth and revenue earn through the year, that gives an average number of employees of 94,300 over the year (I realise this is an oversimplification), and revenue per employee of $1,444,546.

That's still lower than Garry's quoted figure of $1.6M, although it's close, and possibly close enough.

The reason I queried it is that he goes out of his way to make the point about profit: "Google's pure profit per employee is actually $1.6 million per year, after all costs." (Emphasis mine.)

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/tech/alphabet-q1-earnings...

You're absolutely right — I annualized net revenue which I interpreted as "net" but certainly is not profit. I've corrected this and will put a note about it.

I'm sorry for the mistake. I'll do better next time.

No stress: thanks for posting the correction.

Even after this correction, the article still doesn't make sense to me:

> net revenue per employee is actually $1.6 million per year, after all costs.

What does "net revenue after all costs" mean? Isn't that operating income or net income rather than revenue (which aren't that high)?

You really should get these things straight before giving people advice.

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