Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?
15 points - yesterday at 6:47 PM
SourceComments
1 million annual:
> If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $1.049.283. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.
3 million annual:
> If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $3.049.283. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.
1 dollar per year:
> If you got to keep your fair share of the profit Amazon.com reported, $77.7B, your salary would be $49.284. You helped Amazon.com make enough to pay you $49.283 more.
The truth is that by working for a company, you get access to environment that makes you much more productive than you'd otherwise be on your own. You also are not on the hook for most of the risks. It is patently unfair, and extremely short-sighted, to claim that investors deserve no compensation for their investment.
Pain.
It's extremely clear you're not writing those yourself, which makes the whole thing very disingenuous if you can't engage with others in your own language.
On second thought, that might be why you attracted flags. Can't be getting the help having thoughts above their station here it seems. Keep up the good work.
You type in your company and your salary. It pulls net income and headcount from SEC 10-K filings and shows what each employee's equal share of the profit would be, and what your salary would look like with it added on.
I know equal-split is a simplification, not a compensation model. It ignores capex, R&D, risk-adjusted returns, and a lot else. But "Walmart made $22 billion" is abstract. "$10,000 per employee" is not. That's the whole point.
You can also browse all ~940 companies ranked by profit per employee (https://yourfairshare.info/browse), or by industry (https://yourfairshare.info/industry) which breaks out buybacks and dividends per worker alongside it.
Static site, no accounts, no tracking. All from SEC filings.
The site is called "Your Fair Share," which is provocative, I know. But the point isn't to tell you what your fair share is. It's to give you a simple calculation that makes you start wondering what it should be. That's a conversation worth having, even if reasonable people will land in very different places.
Some caveats since this crowd will rightly push on them:
1. Net income is after taxes, interest, and a lot of accounting choices. It's not "profit the company hid from workers." It's what they reported to the SEC after everything else.
2. Equal split is a hypothetical that puts the number on a per-person scale. Nothing more.
3. Capital-intensive industries (airlines, utilities, manufacturing) look less dramatic because margins are thin relative to headcount. Most interesting for high-margin businesses.
4. I've verified the top ~200 companies against primary sources (10-K filings, press releases, EDGAR XBRL). The long tail has gaps. There's a data feedback link on every result.
Look, I wholly agree that there are many things that need fixing in the American version of capitalism, but lord, this ain't it.