6 ms·

I'm quite surprised - $2.06 on staffing seemed steep, so obviously read on as I was thinking that there must be a lot of employees. But 8? OK, I'm just a teac

• walrus01 10y ago
  people who seriously know how to code mission critical X.590 root CA PKI infrastructure are not cheap when you're looking at total benefits/compensation per head.
  • MustardTiger 10y ago
    >people who seriously know how to code mission critical X.590 root CA PKI infrastructure are not cheap And they also aren't working at letsencrypt.
    • eropple 10y ago
      You've exhaustively enumerated those people, have you? I know a couple folks at Let's Encrypt in passing and they are at the top of my list of folks I would want writing code for me if I needed to trust it with, if not my life, most stuff up to that point.
      • Dylan16807 10y ago
        I'm not saying they're right, but it's not hard to enumerate 3 or 8 people.
      • MustardTiger 10y ago
        Ok, but how little you value your life and how little you know about secure coding isn't useful to the rest of us.
  • resmote 10y ago
    Creating a certificate is easy.
    • resmote 10y ago
      Go ahead and down vote me LetsEncrypt employees. It just proves my point.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • msinclair 10y ago
      It sure is! Just go to https://letsencrypt.org https://letsencrypt.org
      • freehunter 10y ago
        It's so easy, I have a cron job do it for me! (That is a comment on how easy LetsEncrypt makes generating certificates, something I very much appreciate).
        • resmote 10y ago
          I agree, LetsEncrypt has done a great job. My original comment was snarky though accurate in a focused sense concerning the actual creation of a self-signed certificate (which can be easily cron jobbed). Of course I understand and appreciate that there is the whole negotiating the larger certificate scene, multiple companies, politics, etc. and that takes time, talent, effort and money. If LetsEncrypt had just come out from the start and said, "we can offer this service for X dollars" then it would have been more transparent.
    • saganus 10y ago
      Creating a certificate might be easy for someone with the proper skillset. However creating an world-class organization that provides certificates as easily as LE does... definitely not.
    • msmith 10y ago
• rch 10y ago
  I guess 20k a month per engineer by default, all in. That's probably out of date since I've been using the same number for over ten years now.
• tonyhb 10y ago
  With things such as tax and healthcare it typically costs a business 1/4 to 1/3 more per employee than their wage, so each person here is perhaps on $180-200k assuming a completely even split. Considering this is deep crypto in San Francisco it's not too surprising.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    > deep crypto I'm sorry but this isn't "deep crypto". Very technical jobs that need a very good job done, since a lot of people depend on it? Sure. But they're not inventing anything new here. With all due respect, signing certificates is something you can grab from the openssl library, rewrite in a memory-safe language, have the community look at, and you're good to go. I'm not saying I think 200k is too much. There are many reasons why it adds up to that much. I just think the technical requirements are not the reason for those wages.
• ddavidn 10y ago
  Yes, that seems about right. I also do not get paid nearly that much, but the location (San Francisco), caliber of required employees and the overhead of benefits certainly adds up.
• vowelless 10y ago
  > an average of $250k seem normal to others on here? For the work that they are doing (including the overhead of an employee -- health, benefits, taxes, etc), this seems cheap.
• Mc_Big_G 10y ago
  "plus two full time staff that are employed by other entities (Mozilla and EFF)" So, that's 10. $206k/employee The accepted amount of benefits & costs per employee is around 35%, so now we're at $134k/employee. This is not a high salary for an engineer in San Francisco. In fact, I'd say it's pretty damn low.
  • JshWright 10y ago
    LE isn't paying for the staff coming from Mozilla and EFF. The 2.06m is split across 8 people, not 10. EDIT: Per a follow up tweet, the staffing is expected to increase to 10 in 2017 (presumably plus the two from third parties), so it is /10, not /8, but not for the reason you described.
    • Mc_Big_G 10y ago
      True, I misunderstood who was paying the salary. Even at 8 it's just a normal SF salary.
• morgante 10y ago
  A fully loaded cost of ~$250k for a senior developer or SRE is not at all extraordinary. Especially when for something like Lets Encrypt you really want/need to hire experts.
• Jtsummers 10y ago
  A note: You don't cost £30k to your employer, more likely 1.5-3x that. So say an employee costs a total of $250k, their pay could be anywhere between $80-180k with other compensation (retirement packages, health benefits) and overhead making up the rest. (the higher the multiple, the less efficient the company likely is, in this case I'd expect it would be closer to the 1.5x mark than the 3x mark)
• jaas 10y ago
  Going to repeat this comment here since people are doing the math: That's for ten employees, not eight. Salary + benefits. Could have been more clear in the post initially, but we have eight employees now and have budgeted for ten in 2017. I added a sentence to the blog post to make this more clear.
• GlennS 10y ago
  I suspect salaries for software developers in San Francisco are just a bit mad. The numbers floating around suggest more than twice what you'd get paid working on hedge fund software in London, which is in turn maybe 3 times more than an ordinary software developer elsewhere in the UK. (If it makes you feel any better, I earn less than you working as a software developer in the UK.)
  • bbcbasic 10y ago
    The hedge fund and biz companies are not getting the VC money chasing the unicorns, whose crazy valuations are propped up by cheap money.
• MustardTiger 10y ago
  No, it is absurdly high. They should be paying half that.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• pyb 10y ago
  Programmers and teachers are not really paid well in the UK !
• bkanber 10y ago
  Your 30k salary costs your employer around 50-60k (I don't know the deal with your benefits and payroll taxes and all that). Rule of thumb in the US is that you add about 40% to a salary to get the total cost to the company to support that salary. And that's just taxes and basic benefits. Add a pension and 401k with matching, and it goes higher.
• cbhl 10y ago
  The pay discrepancy between teachers and programmers in San Francisco is really bad. - School districts in SF and Oakland are short dozens of teachers -- imagine having sixty classrooms on the first day of school where there is no teacher. (e.g. http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Bay-Area-school-districts-scramble-amid-teacher-6446569.php http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Bay-Area-school-dist... from last year) - San Francisco is basically building "dorms" for teachers to give them a place to live: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Mayor-and-SFUSD-have-a-plan-to-help-teachers-keep-6583001.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Mayor-and-SFUSD-have-a... - Many teachers are leaving the area to go work in more affordable parts of the country: http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/teacher-pay/ http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/teacher-pay/
  • wtbob 10y ago
    > The pay discrepancy between teachers and programmers in San Francisco is really bad. I'd say, 'reflects the distribution of skills and positions available' rather than 'is really bad.' There is at least an order of magnitude more people capable of being minimally-acceptable public-school teachers than are capable of being minimally-acceptable Silicon Valley programmers.
    • selllikesybok 10y ago
      That's a fascinating assumption.
    • zorked 10y ago
      Why is it a given that teachers "must" have low salaries? The sixty classrooms without teachers show otherwise. SF teachers clearly need raises, and those can be funded by taxes from all those programmers that presumably benefit from having schools in their communities. In fact there is no reason why teacher wages shouldn't keep up with the general state of the community where they live in.
      • wtbob 10y ago
        > Why is it a given that teachers "must" have low salaries? I explained why: at least an order of magnitude more people are capable of meeting the minimal requirements to be teachers than are capable of meeting the minimal requirements to be developers, thus the former will always be less-well-paid than the latter. > The sixty classrooms without teachers show otherwise. They may not be due to pay but due to union rules. And, of course, even if teachers should make more that doesn't mean that they should make much > In fact there is no reason why teacher wages shouldn't keep up with the general state of the community where they live in. Are you saying that teachers should make a mean or median wage? I think that's a little silly, as it's hardly a profession requiring high innate talent and intensive study, unlike engineering, medicine, law, religion. Frankly, I think a welder or a plumber should be paid more than a teacher. But it shouldn't matter what you & I think teachers should be paid: their wages should be set by the market, as should everyone's. That's the closest thing to fair we'll ever be able to get.