So the employee count is an aggregation of the sel

So the employee count is an aggregation of the self-reporting of individuals in their own profiles, that LinkedIn is evidently able to cull from multiple social media (and other) platforms. That is interesting. I didn't know that.

I guess that accounts for the dead person still showing as an employee. He was no longer around to update his profile. The LinkedIn aggregation algorithm was unable to sort between living and dead people. There is no proof or interrogation of data to determine accuracy and assess validity.

That makes the employee count more suspect than I had imagined. A loose correspondence between the employee count and actual number of employees. At best a lag time for the two lists to approach alignment. And as you noted previously, even the definition of employee is open to interpretation.

Still, when you are groping in the dark, as we are, it is one of the very few things we have to show as a sign of life. With a ton of caveats.

A while back when I reported the LinkedIn employee count, there were actually two lists in circulation, as I noted. One exclusively of "current" employees, and another more detailed list that showed both current and former employees. So it looks that whatever aggregation method is employed there is some attempt at quality control.