[bradleyjg]

I think if you follow this line of thinking you end up with a (economic) rent to labor ratio. Any kind of expensive piece of equipment could have been built by employees so by the same token that you count contractors you can include the labor component of those capital expenditures and so on and so forth.

[mattzito]

I think there's a difference between capex and opex here - it clearly doesn't make sense for Exxon to build and design their own oil wells and pumps, as there's economies of scale and domain expertise for a dedicated vendor to provide those things as a capital expenditure. But if we're going to measure "revenue per employee", where the desired measure is "how efficient is each company at extracting value for every person engaged in value extraction", maybe there's a better measure like "human opex relative to revenue"?