Tech Employee Costs

Why not? Employment can cost a lot. They have 2.5k employees so the base of the estimation is $600K on average. Even if you don't count their equity compensation, their base salary is known to be best in the industry ($250K~$500K?) so $600K makes sense since then the real cost of employment include other various stuffs other than just cashes.

That doesn’t seem huge? 50M for 130 is a bit less than 400k revenue per employee. Of that revenue you’re already spending at least 100-200k on the employee themselves

Its actually 2.06m for 10 employees: https://twitter.com/0xjosh/status/778283999609298944

They said they have 12 million paying users. 30 employees is nothing - even if they all make 500k/year. Is everything else simply servers and bandwidth?

$2.06M for eight employees seems very steep

Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per employee. What's all that money for?

If you were being paid $300K/year, it costs your employer (as a rule of thumb) 1.5x, or about $450K/year. The only reason they could spend $450K/year on you is if they expected to make at least that much money with you, compared to what they would make without you. Even if you aren't directly working on this stuff, you are providing them with capital that is being spent on it.

Isn't employee salary the #1 expense for most tech companies? And isn't the rule of thumb about $160,000 per year per employee on average, and that's assuming high-end engineer types? By that metric they'd need $16 million per year just to pay salaries. $45 million income is 2.8 times what's needed for salaries, which leaves plenty for profit.

At a very modest average value of $70,000 per employee for 3000 employees, that's about 2 years' worth of salaries. That's not a lot of money for FB to spend.

Think you meant 9,000 per employee in this case.