5 ms·

> 10% of a developer's cost is something like $4000/month What company pays developers $40000/month and are they hiring?

pchristensen 4mo ago
A company's fully loaded cost (payroll taxes, insurance, fixed company costs, infra, real estate, etc) is usually about double the employee's salary. Half of $40k is 20k/mo, which is ~$250k/hr. That's a lot but very in-bounds for software engineering salaries.
- christophilus 4mo ago
  Hm. I’ve been way, way underselling myself this whole time.
  - oblio 4mo ago
    Not necessarily. Those jobs are very hard to get and you have to live in the right places. At most 1% of software devs will make that much, at any point in their careers.
- imtringued 4mo ago
  $250k/hour is half a billion USD per year. Nobody is paid that much. Based on such a basic mistake, I wouldn't trust the rest of your comment. Everything you listed feels like made up arbitrary excuses. Most of the overhead per employee is fixed, that doubling rule of thumb is assuming an employee with a salary closer to the median. At the salary you're claiming, the overhead shrinks to something like 30% on top of the base salary. If anyone took your numbers seriously they would run into the weird conclusion that an employee paid $50k actually costs a company $300k. That's the type of math error you're doing here.
  - ido 4mo ago
    > Based on such a basic mistake The mistake of 'h' instead of 'y' typo?
  - pchristensen 4mo ago
    I didn't make those numbers up - here's a widely cited source from MIT: https://nutsandbolts.mit.edu/BBJ/EmployeeCost.php https://nutsandbolts.mit.edu/BBJ/EmployeeCost.php Overhead is not fixed per employee - things like taxes and benefits scale with salary, not to mention the cost of tooling (hardware, software, AI token budget, etc) tend to be higher for higher-compensated employees. You definitely shouldn't plan your business based on my comment, but you'd be foolish to ignore it.
qurren 4mo ago
> What company pays developers $40000/month Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, Netflix, Nvidia, to name a few
- dzonga 4mo ago
  majority of software engineers are not employed at those companies but rather at banks, small / medium startups etc. we need to start using that median instead of using salaries from the Magnificent 7.

pchristensen 4mo ago

A company's fully loaded cost (payroll taxes, insurance, fixed company costs, infra, real estate, etc) is usually about double the employee's salary. Half of $40k is 20k/mo, which is ~$250k/hr. That's a lot but very in-bounds for software engineering salaries.

christophilus 4mo ago
Hm. I’ve been way, way underselling myself this whole time.
- oblio 4mo ago
  Not necessarily. Those jobs are very hard to get and you have to live in the right places. At most 1% of software devs will make that much, at any point in their careers.
imtringued 4mo ago
$250k/hour is half a billion USD per year. Nobody is paid that much. Based on such a basic mistake, I wouldn't trust the rest of your comment. Everything you listed feels like made up arbitrary excuses. Most of the overhead per employee is fixed, that doubling rule of thumb is assuming an employee with a salary closer to the median. At the salary you're claiming, the overhead shrinks to something like 30% on top of the base salary. If anyone took your numbers seriously they would run into the weird conclusion that an employee paid $50k actually costs a company $300k. That's the type of math error you're doing here.
- ido 4mo ago
  > Based on such a basic mistake The mistake of 'h' instead of 'y' typo?
- pchristensen 4mo ago
  I didn't make those numbers up - here's a widely cited source from MIT: https://nutsandbolts.mit.edu/BBJ/EmployeeCost.php https://nutsandbolts.mit.edu/BBJ/EmployeeCost.php Overhead is not fixed per employee - things like taxes and benefits scale with salary, not to mention the cost of tooling (hardware, software, AI token budget, etc) tend to be higher for higher-compensated employees. You definitely shouldn't plan your business based on my comment, but you'd be foolish to ignore it.

qurren 4mo ago

> What company pays developers $40000/month Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, Netflix, Nvidia, to name a few

dzonga 4mo ago
majority of software engineers are not employed at those companies but rather at banks, small / medium startups etc. we need to start using that median instead of using salaries from the Magnificent 7.