[laila90]

Hi, no worries, thanks for asking! Curious what you’re seeing are the salary bands in competitive low-cost locations?

We’re currently most familiar with the bands in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and UAE. What we’re seeing there varies widely, but can probably be thought of as breaking down into two separate scales/salary bands: those paid by local companies and by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily for affordability, and those paid by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily because they need strong engineers.

In the former, the band for junior engineers straight out of college with no work experience is ~$800-$1800/month. In the latter, it’s $2500-$4500/month. For senior engineers, in the former it’s around $5k/month and in the latter it’s $6k-$10k/month.

Of course startups sometimes seek strong talent but can’t afford the range, so they may pay on the lower end but make up for it with equity, career growth, etc.

[julianlam]

Thank you for the response.

I am not the original commenter, but compensation was also my first thought and worry. Regardless, I still filled out the form and look forward to speaking to someone from your team.

The reality is that hiring is hard. It is doubly hard when you don't have a name brand company, and doubly hard again when you are not VC-backed and can't pay salaries competitive to those companies.

We're a tech company on our way to becoming independently owned again (after a small angel round many years ago), and bootstrap our growth according to revenue. This fact leads us to be very fiscally conservative (especially for a startup). A consistent pain point for us has been the fact that we need engineers to take on larger (or more) projects, but we can't afford them (they'd cost more than a project would bring), but we also can't take on these projects without more engineers, so we've been in a holding pattern unwilling to pull the trigger for quite awhile.

I presume this is not a new story to you. This situation is the only reason we cannot hire locally, we literally cannot afford it.

[ilianam]

Thanks for sharing that. It is indeed really hard - and as startup founders, we understand! Just wanted to clarify that many of our engineers do want to work on startups with interesting missions… what matters most ultimately to them (and to us) is the team they’ll work with and the experience they'll get.

Laila is personally meeting with all of our potential new partners because we really care about understanding your customers’ needs & making sure that our solution addresses them. Will be interesting for you to discuss this with her. (Assuming you booked a call? You should have received an invite after you filled out the form.)