The Zombie Apocalypse Scale

A thought experiment proposes measuring how 'tech' a company is by how many days it could operate if all employees became zombies overnight. Companies like Google might run for weeks due to automation, while consulting firms like McKinsey would immediately fail, being purely human-dependent. The framework highlights the tension between valuing human capital and the tech industry's drive toward automation, where the ideal engineer automates themselves out of existence. The scale reveals that true tech companies minimize human dependency, raising questions about labor, inequality, and the concentration of profits in automated systems.