July 19, 2026
Your paycheck vs. the profit pile
Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?
This salary calculator sparked a workplace meltdown over who really gets the money
TLDR: A Hacker News project lets workers compare their salary with the profit their public company makes per employee using public records. Commenters split between “this is a wake-up call” and “this is anti-investor fantasy,” with a side of bug-spotting when one user said the calculator gave nearly identical Amazon results every time.
A new Show HN tool asks a brutally simple question: how much profit does your employer make per worker, and how much of that lands in your paycheck? You enter a public US company and your salary, and it compares your pay with the company’s reported yearly profit per employee using public financial filings. The maker framed it as the flip side of a worker-owned business directory they previously shared: if owners collect the upside, what are workers actually generating?
And wow, the comments instantly turned into a mini class war. One camp called it a “noble effort” and said the numbers at giant tech companies can be genuinely eye-opening, even life-changing. One commenter flat-out said realizations like this made them leave jobs before, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes executives spill their coffee. Another person suggested the post may have been heavily flagged because it makes people think a little too hard about where all that money goes.
But the backlash arrived just as fast. Critics accused the tool of sneaking in old-school labor theory arguments and mocked the idea that profits should be split evenly, asking, basically, “so investors get nothing now?” Then came the comedy: one user noticed the Amazon result barely changed no matter what salary they entered, turning the thread into an accidental bug hunt. So yes, the calculator got people talking about fairness, capitalism, ownership—and whether the math itself was having a moment.
Key Points
- •The tool lets users enter a US employer name or ticker symbol and their compensation to estimate profit per employee.
- •It works best for US-listed public companies and uses net income and headcount from SEC 10-K filings.
- •The output shows an equal per-employee share of reported profit and what a salary would look like with that amount added.
- •Users can browse about 940 companies ranked by profit per employee or view industry breakdowns including buybacks and dividends per worker.
- •The article states the site is static, has no accounts or tracking, does not store salary data, and includes caveats about accounting choices, equal-split simplification, industry differences, and data verification coverage.