November 2, 2025
Headcount down, hot takes up
The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital
Big Tech’s money rockets while hiring stalls — comments call hype, “duh,” and doom
TLDR: Big Tech keeps boosting revenue without adding many workers, and Amazon even says AI could shrink office roles. Commenters are split between hype skeptics, “software scales” realists, and data-sticklers demanding contractor and hours math—because if profits keep rising with fewer people, jobs and pay are in play.
The article claims the richest tech giants are making way more money without hiring nearly as many people. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are stacking extra $100 billion chunks of revenue with fewer and fewer new staff, while Amazon’s CEO even hinted AI will shrink office jobs. That’s the news — but the comments turned it into a cage match.
Skeptics dragged the rosy charts, with one reader mocking “exponential” forecasts as “busboy giving investment advice” energy. Others said, calm down, this is just economies of scale — when software sells, you don’t need a factory full of hands. A salty crowd yelled “paywall” and “this is obvious,” arguing a lone coder can ship a money-printing app. A former Fortune 100 tech worker chimed in with a mic-drop: a dozen-person team drove nationwide revenue. The nitpickers demanded receipts: are these full-time staff only? What about contractors, part-timers, and person-hours? Meanwhile, the meme lords latched onto the line “the first hundred billion is the hardest,” turning it into a faux self-help mantra. The vibe: half hype-police, half “we told you so,” with a side of anxiety that AI will juice profits while humans read the “we’ll need fewer people” memo.
Key Points
- •The article argues that mega-cap tech firms increasingly add far fewer employees for each additional $100B in revenue, a trend evident even before generative AI’s rise.
- •Historical baselines: HP reached $100B revenue in 2007 with ~172k employees; IBM achieved it the next year with nearly 400k.
- •Apple reached $100B in 2011 with ~60k employees; its latest $100B increment reportedly took ~17k incremental employees, though pandemic-era hiring partly disrupted the pattern.
- •Alphabet and Microsoft show sharp declines in labor per incremental revenue: Alphabet’s recent $100B increment required ~11k employees; Microsoft’s required ~7k, down from earlier much larger adds.
- •Amazon, despite its large retail workforce, added its last $200B in revenue with ~36k incremental employees; its CEO anticipates AI-driven efficiency and the author projects reaching $1T revenue with +100k–200k headcount in 3–4 years.