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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

A quick glance at Google's profit per employee disproves that. After paying for employees and everything else, Google profits $270,123 per employee.

I'm not sure what would make you think that some of the most profitable companies in history are castles built on sand.

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Mind explaining how you got that number? Not being snarky, just curious.

Googled it.

Yeah I'm curious too. I however looked up how many employees they had in 2014 (http://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-tim...), and their quarterly reports for 2014 (https://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG), and got that they profited in the ballpark of 13-14 billion, and had 47,756 employees, so their profits would be somewhere between 270 and 290 thousand USD per employee.

I'm not good enough at reading these quarterly reports to be surer than this :-)

.. and on that note, having the age data of 823 employees from payscale.com seems a rather small sample set for a company of ~50k employees. I also wonder what kind of bias the source introduces, ie. whether your interest in your salary is different based on your age (I don't know).

No idea how he got it but you can do this from their earnings statement yesterday [1]:

Free cash flow $3.69B, total employees 55,419

$66,583 per employee of free cash flow (that is simply money they deposited in the bank) or

GAAP Net Income $3.556B for $64,166 per employee in net income.

I believe the $270K/employee is long gone and won't be seen again.

[1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q1_google_earnings....

You're looking at quarterly numbers, the original poster was almost certainly talking of annual ones.

Ah there is that so 4x those numbers.

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