[zaroth]

Budgets are set by costs. When you run a business, you care about the “fully burdened” cost of each employee, and you hire as many as you can within your budget. One of the line items in that is my half of the payroll tax. Another line item is health insurance. Another may be an offset for office space and equipment.

Whether my fully burdened cost budget has a line item for health insurance being paid to a 3rd party or to the employee is totally irrelevant. Tax law currently happens to make it much more efficient for me to pay that money to a 3rd party, so that’s where it goes.

The reason I have that line item is due to a combination of market forces and regulation. By no means do I get to choose just not to pay it, if I expect employees to keep working for me, or the government not to shut me down.

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

> When you run a business [...] you hire as many as you can within your budget.

It sounds like you’re saying that employers are always trying to hire as many people as possible.

Which would be nonsense, of course.

[zaroth]

That’s not what I wrote. In fact, not even what you quoted me as writing.

A bizarrely uncharitable non-takedown, and completely besides the point as well?

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, but I believe I have quoted you accurately.

[chrisseaton]

> and you hire as many as you can within your budget

If you believe this then what's your explanation for why Google hires a smaller number of expensive engineers, rather than a larger number of cheaper engineers? They could hire 10x if they went for only lower-tier college new-grads!

[zaroth]

Sorry if I missed the word “qualified” - I felt it was presumed by the word “hired”.

Obviously a business would not be particularly successful hiring janitors to write code simply because they could pay them less.

[lbotos]

Google is budgeting for more expensive engineers, so they end up hiring less.