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.
Look, I wholly agree that there are many things that need fixing in the American version of capitalism, but lord, this ain't it.
"$22 billion in profit" means nothing to most people. "$10,000 per employee" does. That's it. The tool is a framing device, not a policy proposal.
What you do with that number is up to you. Maybe you think the current split is fair. Maybe you think you should ask for a raise. Maybe you just find it interesting. All fine.
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.
You're right that the per-employee share is the same regardless of salary. That's the point: it shows what the company made per head, and then what your salary would look like with that added on top. The salary input just personalizes it.
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.
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.
When $employer beats or misses targets, that affects my bonus (which is formalized for only the higher pay bands, probably on the theory that we can actually have some individual impact somehow) but not my base salary which is actually the vast majority of what I'm paid.
Risk isn't zero, but it's far less than what the equity holders see.
I'm all for unions and collective bargaining but I'm not a fan of manipulated dissatisfaction.
Access to many of the companies I worked for allowed me to support their monopolies just like desktop bundling (MS), pay store fees(AAPL), search advertising (GOOG), and so on. I guess you could call that "more productive"?
The same is, of course, true about Google or Apple. Working at Apple will make it much easier for you to be productive than working at your own company. The nice thing about our industry is that the latter, while more difficult, is actually possible -- unlike steel mill workers, software engineers don't need as much capital investment, and can run highly successful companies that employ just one or a handful of people. It's just hard and risky to try that, hence people prefer to pretend that the productivity enabled by working as part of established, successful company is entirely due to their own merit.
Both Capital and Labour invest in the company, in different ways. It's not at all clear to me that the optimal arrangement is that Capital reaps the bulk of the return from those investments.
Equity grants (and especially options) aren't particularly controversial in tech, and I'm not saying they're the answer to the problem at hand. But they're a mechanism for allowing workers to share in the gain from their investment. All the problems (especially with US tax treatment of options) notwithstanding.
Mega corps have access to guaranteed bailout by governments as they're considered National Security concern, plus massive lobbying departments to buy all the laws they need to favor themselves over most potential competitors both external and internal, plus massive legal departments with experts at twisting the laws they didn't manage to buy yet into meaning whatever they want them to mean.
And after all that socialism-for-the-rich, any remaining risk is transferred directly to their employees in the form of lay offs, coupled with non-compete clauses that forbid the most competent, for months to years, from working at their core area of expertize, plus arbitration clauses that forbid them from seeking relief at the actual courts. Clauses that are enforced by the courts due to the aforementioned lobbying and purchased laws.
IESAI_ski•19h ago
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.
Tiberium•18h ago
Maybe you should start by not writing your HN posts with an LLM..
IESAI_ski•18h ago
Tiberium•17h ago
IESAI_ski•17h ago
Tiberium•16h ago