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If you factor in the people-hours behind the AWS services Netflix uses, I'm sure their number looks a lot different.
by gphil 11y ago
If you factor in the people-hours behind the AWS services Netflix uses, I'm sure their number looks a lot different.
- phamilton 11y agoDo you mean to say that we should include the people who make the products consumed by Netflix? That's a very odd way of looking at it. Is that because there are entire teams at AWS supporting Netflix, which makes them more like contractors?
- mfjordvald 11y agoThe logic is that if you outsource your ops team to AWS you have less people but your revenue is still the same, you're just paying AWS instead of salaries. So if we take the revenue per person number as anything significant then netflix skews that by using AWS. Ultimately it's a number without much meaning.
- joshuahutt 11y agoWell, then, couldn't you subtract the cost of their AWS bill (or some fraction of that cost) from their revenue, to adjust for the lower headcount?
- mrgordon 11y agoIt would be difficult so no one bothers. How many "people" is monthly use of S3, DynamoDB, RDS, Route 53, etc. equivalent to? Its not easy or worthwhile to estimate. Revenue per employee can be a bit of a vanity metric.
- riffraff 11y agowell, the obvious solution is using profit/people rather than revenue/people, isn't it? EDIT: ah, as another commenter mentioned, it is also true that you might be growing fast with low profit so I guess both measures make sense (or not) in different contexts.
- knughit 11y agoIt's because revenue isn't meaningful, profit is.
- phamilton 11y agoProfit is not always meaningful either. Running at full Op Ex (eg, hiring a larger team) can reduce profit to near zero, but if it leads to growth it's money well spent.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- forgetsusername 11y ago>but if it leads to growth it's money well spent. ...provided that the growth leads to more profit at some point in the future.
- phamilton 11y agoTurtles all the way down.