That's what I was saying. It mostly seems to be a thing that happens in Silicon Valley and some big cities. There's good programmers in places with lower cost o

That's what I was saying. It mostly seems to be a thing that happens in Silicon Valley and some big cities. There's good programmers in places with lower cost of living that are cheaper. Even the high end of them would approach the low end of the typical salaries in Silicon Valley. One approach I'd explore was a mix of highly-experienced people in the domain with large checks plus good programmers in the cheap areas supporting their work. There's also a few companies in my area that will pay for smart folks college if they do a 3-4 year agreement with the company. If they already program and have good mentorship, they should start getting pretty good in the first year. The salary combined with the yearly college expenses is usually about half of a Silicon Valley programmer. Multiply by several hundred people to get a lot of savings that could accelerate features or get into new markets. If I was Mozilla, I'd doing the later buying small companies doing user- and privacy-focused variants of popular services. Then, they could have a whole umbrella of stuff to offer to differentiate them based on reputation. I'd at least try a paid offering in the enterprise space as well.