Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles

91 points vfxGer 1 hour ago 26 comments

vfxGer 1 hour ago | parent

I was playing around with visualising the S&P 500 by market cap and decided to add employees to each company's bubble.

What surprised me was how empty some of the biggest companies looked.

Nvidia is worth $5.2 trillion but employs only 42,000 people. That's around $124 million in market cap per employee. Meanwhile, Accenture employs 814,000 people and is worth $146 billion.

Each stick figure represents 10,000 employees. You can zoom in and explore individual companies.

I wrote a bit more about what I found here: https://bigwhalehunting.com/blog/workforce/

Would be interested to hear what you think.

delichon 16 minutes ago | parent

A very useful perspective of the market. I love how now you can just delegate a bot to keep it up to date. I hope you do, and add visualizations for the trends.

fhdkweig 1 hour ago | parent

Curious why the comment by the poster got flagged but not the full post. I like when the poster includes a comment describing the content and reasons why he liked it.

dmayle 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect it was one of the content review bots. In my first Show HN post, I handwrote the comment, but using a bulleted list style suggested by an AI agent, and that got flagged. I reached out to the mods, and they told me to switch to prose, which passed muster.

codingdave 1 hour ago | parent

I dislike that. IMO, if the content cannot stand on its own, it did not need to be posted. A comment that adds something to it, to initiate a discussion, is fine. But a comment that just says what that post is? That is neither interesting nor engaging.

Such comments also encourage the idea that people "own" the threads they start. I've seen people get mad when people take the conversation in a direction they did not want, or add instructions telling people what to talk about and putting constraints around discussion. Such things stifle interesting conversation.

So I land heavily the opposite direction. Just post, and leave it at that. If the community finds it interesting, discussion will ensue.

Now, Show HNs are their own thing. An initial explanation is absolutely appropriate for a show HN. But it should be part of the post, not a comment.

fwipsy 40 minutes ago | parent

Even so, not sure it qualifies for flagging

soared 1 hour ago | parent

1. The legend uses different icons than the visualization 2. Why would you purposefully make every bubble empty? Change the scale to 1000 employees otherwise it’s deceptive. 10k employees is arbitrary.

QuantumNomad_ 1 hour ago | parent

1000 or 10k per stick figure is equally arbitrary.

What they actually need to do is scale the size of the stick people correctly.

For example, one meaningful measure might be to scale it so that one stick person fits inside a circle with area corresponding to the amount of money they have to earn in total for that number of people to cover all their living expenses and some amount of savings left over. I am sure some statistical bureau has some meaningful dollar amount of some sort that makes sense to use.

mlyle 1 hour ago | parent

Just make it so that the companies that employ the most per market cap are filled, so we can see how empty the rest are.

paxy 1 hour ago | parent

Number of employees isn't a straightforward calculation.

- A lot of companies have part time, seasonal and contract workers (e.g. Amazon and Walmart). For some this even makes up the majority of their workforce.

- Some companies operate on a franchise model, and corporate employees are very limited. For example the 414K employees listed for Marriott aren't directly employed by them. But then you don't apply the same logic to McDonalds, where you are only counting the corporate employees.

- Holding companies (like Berkshire Hathaway) show the full employee count of their portfolio companies even through they may only own a small share. And again the logic isn't consistent because you are only counting 714 employees for Welltower, which is also a holding company.

Collecting incomplete or incorrect data and adding a hunded disclaimers at the end of the report is standard LLM behavior. Actually valuable analysis of this sort needs a lot more human effort.

Grombobulous 1 hour ago | parent

The blog post OP linked puts more context into it, and I think it also makes it clear that they’re not trying to make an apples to apples comparison. It’s a tool that can aid in visualizing how different companies can be structured.

vfxGer 1 hour ago | parent

Fair point, I was aware of that and mention it in the accompanying blog https://bigwhalehunting.com/blog/workforce/

mbesto 43 minutes ago | parent

> Collecting incomplete or incorrect data and adding a hunded disclaimers at the end of the report is standard LLM behavior. Actually valuable analysis of this sort needs a lot more human effort.

Or it's classic modern journalism that gets clicks. LLMs are just mimic'n human behavior.

t1234s 20 minutes ago | parent

I imagine Tesla has a vast amount of contract workers with all the construction they do.

brador 1 hour ago | parent

What will this look like after the coming AI investment crash/growth stagnation inflection point?

It’s gonna be a wild ride to 2030.

rvz 1 hour ago | parent

We have less than 4 years left to prepare before 2030 [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558516

LogicFailsMe 38 minutes ago | parent

Counterpoint: fortunately we still have more than 5 years to prepare for 2032.

samayashar 42 minutes ago | parent

Welltower and Palantir are doing an amazing job! A comparison with NVIDIA in terms of market cap per employee isn't realistic here, but perks to them for the utility that each employee is bringing to the table.

willio58 24 minutes ago | parent

> Welltower and Palantir are doing an amazing job!

It’s funny to read that from this becuase I read it as these companies are so good at exploiting capitalism that they can make this much profit and benefit so few actual people in the country. It’s like they’re a leech on the country, rather than companies to be proud of.

If we have hundreds of hyper-successful companies but we have people going into medical bankruptcy for a cancer diagnosis, I’d say America is failing at taxing these companies enough to fund what actually matters in society.

yoz-y 27 minutes ago | parent

TIL that Broadcom is a 1.6T company.

fnord77 25 minutes ago | parent

I think revenue per employee is more interesting. By this measure, tech companies are minuscule compared to energy and real estate companies.

https://i.imgur.com/4DPs1Io.png

https://i.imgur.com/LgFx831.png

wastedpotencial 22 minutes ago | parent

Offtopic: It's infuriating how I clicked the site and it wasn't loading. Scrolled the comments looking for a "hug to death" mention but found none, then realized I live in Spain and today is football day...

I'll check the site when a football private company decides allows me to.

tomrod 15 minutes ago | parent

Alphabet and Meta are misclassed, they are information technology.

Tesla should (probably) be in industrials, as a car and battery tech company.

Amazon is hard to class, you might check if they break out to subsidiaries for AWS versus consumer retail. Part is definitely competing with Walmart.

iandanforth 11 minutes ago | parent

Very cool! It would be nice to have a constant dollars option. I always like to be able to correct for inflation.