Compare with APPL and FB doing [correction: over $600k] per employee per quarter.

Not a value judgment. But I only recently started noticing these numbers and it really puts the big players’ spending power into perspective. Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.

Edit: thanks for the corrections in the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.

For things that are completely software, it does not surprise me that millions per employee in earnings is realized - that's just what happens when you operate at that scale. And that's accounting for all of the overhead in personnel that scale entails.

Even then, they can still be insanely profitable per engineer.

I think initially they only expanded to ~50 engineers until 900M users. Even today they are estimated to have only ~500 employees (no idea what percentage of that are engineers).

Engineering is listed as 25% of those 1823, operations 8%, education 6% and business development 6%.

I like "MAGNAM" if you include Microsoft.

I think Oculus is much more similar to Stadia than something else too.

Additionally, all of those platforms you mention du the same thing: chat and share pics.

Under the Google umbrella or alphabet is the same. Just like under Facebook or Meta.

Nobody cares about the exact legal construction of those products. Plenty of people still say FANG, where it's short for Google and not Alphabet.

Nice nitpick, but you obviously mispositioned your initial comment by putting the emphasis on household names and not on the legal structure, which is a strange argument fyi.

While I'm doing a low-content post, here's a tangential fun fact: the Latin sequence "gn" (as in, say, "magna cum laude") was pronounced with the G nasalized. If magna were rendered in English spelling, it'd be "mangna". (Or, well, "mongna".)

Some of these measures make it look like Google's zero-customer-support approach is the 'efficient' way to run a business but for a lot of companies it'd be a false economy.

I guess a somewhat better metric would be "profit per employee" instead of revenue.

Clearly keeping facebook platform from breaking the law on childporn is pretty central to their business, but pizza is not

your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.

https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278...

That seems to be changing, as the employees at those companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".

According to LinkedIn the average tenure of employees is a little over a year (likely to hit the vesting cliff and bounce).

Two months ago they didn't have the staff to review pull requests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849

You can love the product, but investors are ultimately betting on the company - which seems shaky.

I think this is usually the case for fast growing companies that typically double employees every year, because:

1/2 people avg. 1/2 year tenure

1/4 people avg. 3/2 year tenure

1/8 people avg. 5/2 year tenure

etc. Which approaches something around ~1 year tenure. You'll notice the same 1.1 year tenure at Stripe, Affirm, etc.

For reference, I also have a friend who applied there in late 2019; he apparently _did_ get a "thanks but no thanks" email about a month later.

Perhaps all of the company is short-staffed, rather than just engineering.

Twitter has the audacity to email a year after my application to let me know that I was "still under consideration."

Google ended my hiring loop by having my emails to my recruiter bounce.

So this is not just a shaky company problem.

Applied, rejected within a day, got an email from a hiring manager four weeks later asking me to re-apply, very sorry etc etc, bad screener he had to look over everything again.

I re-apply, two interviews, asked to do a presentation and then a video on strategic threats to the org, spent two days of my holiday doing it (tight schedule from Twitter), sent, no reply for two weeks, get an email back saying they wanted it to be more tactical.

I pointed out what they said (it needs to be strategic), they come back two weeks later, very sorry etc, they would love to move me to next stage, one week later hiring manager doesn't turn up for interview, two days later apologises, asks me to meet with his senior manager in two weeks. I agree.

Recruiter then turns around and says, sorry not what they are looking for. No other explanation. Next day emails me asking would I apply for another position. I say, "Hmmm not so sure. Perhaps. What's the comp?" He says "Great, I think you will fit well. I will go check it." Then ghosted...

Was a cool role. But still. I'm in a position were I am also interviewing the people on the other side of the table. I'd love to have helped build something they needed about that fusion and analysis.

But sorry, in that context, just not good enough. That's my first dealing with your company. Why should I trust anything else will be better?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697

New HN entry for the updated blog post link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29116611

news.ycombinator.com needs a ycombinator.com/topcompanies equivalent.

Vagrant is my safety hatch, in case Docker goes under and aspect of it that's "the best centralized, cross-distro, server-oriented Linux package manager repository around" is, at least temporarily, thrown into disarray. Back to picking a distro and contorting it into what I need, in that case.

And it's still better than Docker if you're really in a hurry and need to get some pile of undocumented shit running locally ASAP.

It's the container registry that I'd miss, not the actual container functionality, and that's what would have me reaching for Vagrant and distro packages again until something similarly good arose (or maybe there already is a viable replacement, which I'd find via search in short order if I actually needed it)

The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?

My point was not to defend Docker, but to suggest that Docker is increasingly irrelevant to the broader ecosystem.

I wouldn't use Vagrant because I (like many people) always target an orchestrator and not hypervisor or bare metal.

I use Docker as a nigh-universal package repository and package manager, with a huge and up-to-date selection of packages. It gives me a consistent way to run daemons my software depends on, nearly everywhere, including pinning the version and ensuring they all use the same config. It's docker-hub, really, that provides most of the value I get from Docker on a day-to-day basis, and that's the part I'd miss. I know there are other ways to create images and run containers, but I almost never create—or even modify—them myself.

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/providers/docker/basics

Maybe that is because he stepped down from leadership to become an IC again? We could speculate that he didn't want to go public, or had no desire to do the S-1 work so he stepped down.

There are only a few places where you can easily promote your saas company, it makes sense that Saas startups that IPO now were promoted when they launched ...

Let's not make whether a company went public a metric for assessing quality. Going public is mostly a matter of how much a company expects the public to pay to get a share for the company. Also, it is a matter of how much the bank which facilitates the offering expects to make. Currently, the markets are sky high, so even not so good companies will make crazy amounts of money for the bank and the company which went public. Just look at the dot com bubble and the IPOs for more information.

Bigger fish to fry. I wish I had that level of focus!

[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28625195

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hashicorp-files-u-ipo-said-18...