home_femaleThe top five tech companies typically fight over who employs the biggest brains, but in this competition, they were ranked by another more superficial factor: beauty.

In a peer review on Hinge, a dating app that seeks to match up young professionals, Amazon employees were found to be the most sought-after, followed by Microsoft, Google and Facebook. In dead last was Apple.

As the WSJ quipped, this clearly doesn’t have anything to do with smartphone market share because otherwise the iPhone-maker would be winning. I might add that it clearly also has nothing to do with perceived wealth, given that Apple’s market cap is nearly four-times larger than Amazon’s.

So, if you can trust the average user of New York-based Hinge, which recently raised $4.5 million in new funding, to measure attractiveness, Amazon’s employees were found to be 14.2 percent more attractive than the average Hinge user; Microsoft workers were 8.2 percent above average; Googlers ranked 7.2 percent higher; and Facebook and Apple techies came in at 2.3 percent and -0.2 percent.

(Interestingly, when segmented by female and male, the results only shifted slightly. For example, Microsoft had the most attractive female employees, followed by Amazon Google, Facebook, and Apple).

One important consideration that seems worth noting is that Hinge, which debuted last year and has roughly three million matches, has not launched yet in Seattle, where the top two winners — Amazon and Microsoft — are located.

That seems like a bug in the system. Sure, both of these tech conglomerates are global, and therefore have employees in D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles, where Hinge operates, but it’s not tapping into either of the company’s central database.

A company spokeswoman said they aren’t disclosing launch dates, but that Seattle is on their roadmap. It’s not clear if location could have impacted results, she said, adding: “We had a statistically significant sample size from each company.”

In the meantime, we must seriously question how much Jeff Reifman has to complain about. If you recall, Reifman is the Seattle tech veteran, who kicked off a pretty heated debate on how Amazon is ruining dating in Seattle because its workforce is 75 percent male. (But at least it’s an attractive workforce, right Jeff?)

Here’s a more detailed infographic put together by the number-crunchers at Hinge. Among other findings, it also says that while Amazonians are the most attractive, they are also the least picky when picking out a prospective mate. (Click for larger image.)

TechWars_infographic_01

 

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