James Pethokoukis rounds up some evidence today that, contrary to their reputations, modern tech companies create just as many jobs as the big industrial giants of yore. The problem is that he’s comparing today’s companies with companies from a century ago, when the labor force was far smaller. You can’t do that. You have to look at jobs as a percent of the entire labor force. When you do that, here’s what his sample set of companies looks like 20 years after their founding:
Modern tech companies are all at the bottom. The only exception is Amazon, and it’s arguable just how much Amazon is really a tech company anyway. Putting a web interface on retail doesn’t really count, but then again, providing cloud services does. So they’re about half and half, which probably explains why they’re in the middle of the chart.
For better or worse, modern tech companies just aren’t huge jobs producers—and as machine intelligence progresses, they’re likely to become even smaller players in the employment market.