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by hughes 3565 days ago
Approximately 100% salary overhead is pretty standard, so eight $125k employees plus infrastructure and office costs sounds reasonable.
4 comments

Is it really 100% in SF? That strikes me as high -- even in a lot of European countries it's not a full 100%.

Anyway: considering what they do and where they do it, I don't find these numbers high at all. I would be shocked if they didn't have at least a couple engineers making over $200K in actual cash compensation if they're working in the Bay Area.

Not really.

Overhead doesn't scale linearly with pay. Once you're into 6 figures, it's definitely not equal. I'm guessing much more like $150-200k per employee in compensation.

Can you explain why there would be 100% salary overhead? This seems quite high as a non business owner/operator.
Taxes, health care, other insurance (disability, etc.), and other benefits (401k, etc.) are a significant fraction of the cost to employ someone. These things are not cheap.

The standard overhead is (I believe--correct me if I'm wrong!) anywhere from 25% to 100%, depending on your base salary and how competitive the benefits package is.

At our company the overhead is about 40% of the salary, and could easily reach 80-100% with bigger and better benefits packages.
Employer taxes, standard benefits (health, vision, dental, etc), extra benefits (like free food, budget for books, and other niceties), and office space.
8 x $125K would be $1M, not the $2M that is currently being spent on employees.

Edit: Missed the first part of that, I apologise. 100% overhead doesn't seem reasonable per employee to me though.

You missed the "100% salary overhead" part of the sentence. Consider taxes, benefits, insurance, other non-salary costs to employing people.
You missed the 100% overhead. Even 50% overhead at a slightly higher salary wouldn't be surprising.
it's (8125k) 2 since there is 100% overhead
He said 100% overhead on top of salary