MSFT has 144k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/profile?p=MSFT)

GOOG has 118k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/profile?p=GOOG)

APPL has 137k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/profile?p=AAPL)

AMZN has 798k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/profile?p=AMZN) Note: this seems incorrect.

INTC has 110k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/profile?p=INTC)

HPQ has 56k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPQ/profile?p=HPQ)

The AMZN number includes FT fulfillment center workers, so that number is in the ball park.

I predict that one of the mid term outcomes of the pandemic will be that all those people in (food) production, logistics (including retail), care and infrastructure that require personal presence will be far more aware of the non-bullshit nature of their jobs than before. Particularly in contrast to the mind workers who can switch to WFH and who, with few exceptions, could stop work for an entire year and society at large would hardly notice. Expect those still leaving their homes for work in two weeks to end the year far more aware of relative pie slice sizes than they were a year earlier.

That would be wonderful. One of the reasons I liked recent UBI proposals is because it jury are nonwage replacing but would do a lot to balance out the understood value of low-training-&-skilled-physical jobs.

How do fulfillment center workers work from home?

Citi (C) has 200K FTE ... they are starting to roll out a shifted WFH to only have partial teams in office and some departments are doing more if their functions allow.

The pay of AMZN executives (except Bezos) is also not making any sense, unless they get a lot more stocks.

They do. Base salary is capped. Stock comp will easily exceed base for more senior people.

Microsoft has about 150k employees and recommended all work from home if they can. Google is around 100k. I don't know who's bigger than Microsoft that also did this.

Tough act to follow for Wallmart... The tech industry has a huge advantage here.

But there are jobs where you'd have the possibility to do this in industries that will take some re-arranging to make it work. Legal and financial for instance, call centers (some technical issues), most design and creative work.

The impossible ones are anything involving care, production and logistics. Even retail could in principle be done but it would require a massive shift on the part of the consumer. Going shopping is very much ingrained and retooling that industry for home delivery is neither fast nor simple when done on a massive scale.

The problem is, Walmart can't shut down. They're the only grocery/drug store left in a lot of smaller towns. People depend on them for necessities. They can shut down most of their departments, the non-essential ones, but they're gonna need the grocery and pharmacy sections to remain open.

They don't need to. If office workers stay home and people can go shopping outside of rush hour, grocery workers should be mostly safe. Especially Walmarts tend to be rather large, it's certainly avoidable to be in close contact with customers there.

Many production and logistics workplaces can probably implement distancing policies. Care, not so much...

Microsoft only recommended WFH in SF/Seattle so far, other sites waiting for it.

WFH is definitely in effect for Microsoft China...

I'm in Vancouver & have been supported in following the Seattle advice

I guess we wait for IBM?

It is hard to track IBM because they have so much change, but for many years IBM has already been a largely WFH culture. I know they recently tried to change that, but not sure how much of the culture they changed.

I was going to say something similar to this.

We did some work with IBM a few years ago and my boss said when he went for an on-site visit it was basically a giant office building that was mostly vacant.

So far no official wfh which is troublesome considering we had engineers going to Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Italy who are based out of my office the last month. No way I am going in to the office. Oh and we have a Korean embassy in our building as well.

IBM is so large and geographically spread out, I doubt they'll be issuing a general WFH order/recommendation.