3 ms·

The rule of thumb used to be, total costs = what you pay them * 1.5 to cover that stuff. So 3200 becomes $4800 (or just under $57k a year) - that's still a goo

The rule of thumb used to be, total costs = what you pay them * 1.5 to cover that stuff. So 3200 becomes $4800 (or just under $57k a year) - that's still a good deal given what you'd get. I've worked with eastern and central European developers and some of them are phenomenal (the skill breakdown is about equivalent to UK devs as a pool maybe tending towards them been slightly better but there will be some element of selection bias in that, language barrier is the biggest hurdle, many of them speak/write good English - my partner is Hungarian and her written English is at least as good as mine) but when the tiniest miss-understanding on requirements is costly during development and potentially devastating in production that really starts to matter.

imtringued 6y ago
I think you are misunderstanding what the $20 refer to. They are what the customer is paying to the company for a single billable hour. That money is not only used to pay the developer but usually the rest of the company too. Sales, marketing, accountants and other employees that aren't directly assigned to a project or are waiting for their next project will have to be paid from that billable hour as well. You can call them greedy or whatever but usually they get away with a 50% cut or sometimes more. Ok, now you are left with $10 which represents the labor cost + office space + equipment needed by the developer himself. So the employee gets paid $6.66 per hour before taxes but the customer is paying $20 for that.