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Budgets are set by costs. When you run a business, you care about the “fully burdened” cost of each employee, and you hire as many as you can within your budget
by zaroth 5y ago
Budgets are set by costs. When you run a business, you care about the “fully burdened” cost of each employee, and you hire as many as you can within your budget. One of the line items in that is my half of the payroll tax. Another line item is health insurance. Another may be an offset for office space and equipment.
Whether my fully burdened cost budget has a line item for health insurance being paid to a 3rd party or to the employee is totally irrelevant. Tax law currently happens to make it much more efficient for me to pay that money to a 3rd party, so that’s where it goes.
The reason I have that line item is due to a combination of market forces and regulation. By no means do I get to choose just not to pay it, if I expect employees to keep working for me, or the government not to shut me down.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago> When you run a business [...] you hire as many as you can within your budget. It sounds like you’re saying that employers are always trying to hire as many people as possible. Which would be nonsense, of course.
- zaroth 5y agoThat’s not what I wrote. In fact, not even what you quoted me as writing. A bizarrely uncharitable non-takedown, and completely besides the point as well?
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y agoI’m sorry for the misunderstanding, but I believe I have quoted you accurately.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> and you hire as many as you can within your budget If you believe this then what's your explanation for why Google hires a smaller number of expensive engineers, rather than a larger number of cheaper engineers? They could hire 10x if they went for only lower-tier college new-grads!
- zaroth 5y agoSorry if I missed the word “qualified” - I felt it was presumed by the word “hired”. Obviously a business would not be particularly successful hiring janitors to write code simply because they could pay them less.
- lbotos 5y agoGoogle is budgeting for more expensive engineers, so they end up hiring less.