Open source should help. Lots of people are cheaper if their work is public (it's better personal marketing and it means they've still got access to the code if

Open source should help. Lots of people are cheaper if their work is public (it's better personal marketing and it means they've still got access to the code if they quit or the company folds). It's worth giving serious consideration to whether the expensive 500k a year dev will outproduce five 100k, or ten 50k developers. There are serious non-linear scaling properties to increasing the headcount of engineering teams. The traditional answer to this problem is equity, but note that engineers have noticed that illiquid equity is a different thing to salary.