Big Whale Hunting workforce visualisation
Finance and crypto
market cap visualisation
SHOW HN2026
Big Whale Hunting workforce visualisation
I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles
bigwhalehunting.com#s&p 500#market cap#employees per company#data visualisation
How HN took it
3 positive, 14 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 8 critical, out of 26 comments about the project. Thread score -0.17.
Idea: 2 for, 4 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Employee-per-market-cap angle is insightful
From 2 comments
@vfxGer, Thank you so much for including # of Employees!!! Its so undervalued. Backstory: At my jobsite, there was an amazing seminar called the 'One Day MBA' taught by Prof Noah…
ConradKilroy on HNWelltower and Palantir are doing an amazing job! A comparison with NVIDIA in terms of market cap per employee isn't realistic here, but perks to them for the utility that each…
samayashar on HN
Stick figures make empty bubbles compelling
From 1 comment
I went straight to the link without reading the description and didn't notice the tiny people added to the center of the circles. Ironically, I was clicking each bubble to find…
bryzaguy on HN
Objections
Employee counts are inconsistent across contract, franchise and holding structures
From 2 comments
Number of employees isn't a straightforward calculation. - A lot of companies have part time, seasonal and contract workers (e.g. Amazon and Walmart). For some this even makes up…
paxy on HNTowards the bottom: > Employee counts come from company reports via Yahoo Finance, with Wikipedia used where figures weren't available. They're not necessarily from the same…
lelandfe on HN
Sector and company inclusion errors, outdated dataset
From 3 comments
Definitely some strange inclusions and exclusions. "Information technology" has NetApp but not Everpure, even though they have the same market cap and are in the same space.…
RussianBot9580 on HNAgreed, Datadog is missing despite being in the S&P 500 as well
aweb on HNBoth missing companies were included recently, suggesting to me that the author used an older dataset.
eep_social on HN
Scale of 10k per figure looks misleading
From 1 comment
1. The legend uses different icons than the visualization 2. Why would you purposefully make every bubble empty? Change the scale to 1000 employees otherwise it’s deceptive. 10k…
soared on HN
Requests
Revenue per employee or gross profit view
From 3 comments
I think revenue per employee is more interesting. By this measure, tech companies are minuscule compared to energy and real estate companies. https://i.imgur.com/4DPs1Io.png…
fnord77 on HNMarket cap per employee is mostly going to reflect whatever multiple the market pays in any given year. Gross profit per employee might be a better indication of what employees…
mehdizare on HNMay i ask why you picked market cap instead of revenue per employee? I'm curious how the chart would look with revenue
hardestfirst on HN
Inflation-adjusted constant dollars option
From 1 comment
Very cool! It would be nice to have a constant dollars option. I always like to be able to correct for inflation.
iandanforth on HN
Larger stick figures and clearer zoom controls
From 2 comments
Cool. I'd make the stick figures a little bigger, hard to see on mobile.
ThrowawayTestr on HNhow do I zoom? there's no + and - buttons and I don't see people icons
NooneAtAll5 on HN
Questions
Why market cap rather than revenue per employee
From 1 comment
May i ask why you picked market cap instead of revenue per employee? I'm curious how the chart would look with revenue
hardestfirst on HN
How zoom works
From 1 comment
how do I zoom? there's no + and - buttons and I don't see people icons
NooneAtAll5 on HN