Note that this model moderately-strongly predicts the existence of tiny hyperprofitable orgs—places founded by someone who wasn’t that driven by dominance-status and managed to make a scalable product without building a dominance-status-seeking management hierarchy. Think Instagram, which IIRC had 13 employees when Facebook acquired it for $1B.
Instagram had no revenue at the time of its acquisition.
faul’s comment represents some of my other objections reasonably well (there are many jobs at large orgs which have marginal benefits > marginal costs). I think I’ve even heard from Google engineers that there’s an internal calculation indicating how what cost savings would justify hiring an additional engineer, where those cost savings can be pretty straightforwardly derived from basic performance optimizations. Given the scale at which Google operates, it isn’t that hard for engineers to save the company large multiples of their own compensation[1]. I worked for an engineering org ~2 orders of magnitude smaller[2] and they were just crossing the threshold where there existed “obvious” cost-saving opportunities in the 6-figures per year range.
The surprising part, to people outside the industry, is that this often isn’t the most valuable thing for a company to spend marginal employees on, though sometimes that’s because this kind of work is often (correctly) perceived as unappreciated drudge work.
Instagram had no revenue at the time of its acquisition.
faul’s comment represents some of my other objections reasonably well (there are many jobs at large orgs which have marginal benefits > marginal costs). I think I’ve even heard from Google engineers that there’s an internal calculation indicating how what cost savings would justify hiring an additional engineer, where those cost savings can be pretty straightforwardly derived from basic performance optimizations. Given the scale at which Google operates, it isn’t that hard for engineers to save the company large multiples of their own compensation[1]. I worked for an engineering org ~2 orders of magnitude smaller[2] and they were just crossing the threshold where there existed “obvious” cost-saving opportunities in the 6-figures per year range.
The surprising part, to people outside the industry, is that this often isn’t the most valuable thing for a company to spend marginal employees on, though sometimes that’s because this kind of work is often (correctly) perceived as unappreciated drudge work.
In headcount; much more than 2 OoMs smaller in terms of compute usage/scale.