In the Bay Area, no, an engineer costs an order of magnitude more. (For a round number, think $15-20k/mo including office space, benefits, etc. for a senior eng

In the Bay Area, no, an engineer costs an order of magnitude more. (For a round number, think $15-20k/mo including office space, benefits, etc. for a senior engineer; that's perhaps a bit high for the period I'm discussing but it also isn't attempting to price the cost of equity grants. At that time Google was probably spending something like $35-40k/mo (maybe higher, I don't know their office/perk costs) on equivalent talent at SWE5 including the liquid RSU grants.) But of course run the cost/benefit calc for your own cost of labor. More importantly, it's critical to think in terms of opportunity cost. Like I said, we couldn't hire engineers fast enough at that time, so if I put someone on this work it would be taking them off some other important project. Plausibly for a fast-growing startup that means eschewing work that's worth $1-2m/eng-yr or more (just looking at concrete increases in company valuation, not present value of future gains). So we're talking on the order of $100k/eng-mo opportunity cost.