On: The magic of small engineering teams

[hartator]

> Startups ship more per person than big companies

Are they?

Apple revenue per engineer is $2.4M. It seems hard to beat.

[ben_w → hartator]

Features shipped != revenue != revenue per engineer != profit

Corporations optimise for profit.

Apple took 2 years to introduce the clipboard to iOS (then "iPhone OS"), and 14 years to port their own calculator to iPad.

[WXLCKNO → hartator]

They don't generate more per person but a startup is definitely going to put out more features and quickly..

[_xivi → hartator]

What does revenue got to do with producing/shipping products? maybe you quoted the wrong sentence?

You can have millions of dollars in revenue without producing anything, on the other hand, you can also provide a lot of services and products for free

[seadan83 → _xivi]

> What does revenue got to do with producing/shipping products?

I'm quite sure a number of product people would answer "everything"

Feature factories are a thing for a reason.

[_xivi → seadan83]

> Feature factories are a thing for a reason.

If anything that goes against the parent comment, how Apple has more revenue per engineer while not being a feature factory by any stretch

In any case, taking both of the comments combined kinda prove my point, that higher revenue can be attributed to many things completely outside how many products/features was shipped:

- Pricing strategy

- You can have a monopoly with a single shitty product

- You can be middle man/broker with no product to begin with

- You can be running a Ponzi scheme or committing fraud

So it doesn't make sense to use revenue (or revenue per team member) as a way to compare teams between different companies and furthermore possibly across completely separate markets and industry