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by CharlieDigital 1202 days ago

    - Federal taxes, 
    - health insurance, 
    - 401k matching,
    - other benefits big corporate SaaS companies offer,
    - office space
I wouldn't say 2x, but definitely salary is not the only cost of an employee.
1 comments

It used to be 1.5x. And I was just wondering where the 2x came from. The non-office space expenses for me add up to maybe an additional 40%. If I was in a better health plan it might theoretically go up to 50%. Tack on expenses for the non-pension retirement plan manager and HR jobs to support employees and I can maybe get to 1.6x. But 2x+ doesn't happen until factoring in consumable and other expenses needed for my job. So I think that has to be a big part of it.
Feel free to use 1.5x, I just made up 2x. Either way, 125k/dev seems low.
Most of their employees are of course not devs, and some of the non-dev roles have greater salaries, while some are baristas.

I looked up their most recent 10k filing: https://s23.q4cdn.com/574569502/files/doc_financials/2023/q4...

From: https://investor.salesforce.com/financials/default.aspx

For the 3 months ending in January 31 2023 page 6 has $5.927 billion in operating expenses. Subtract out the $0.828 billion in restructuring costs for $5.099 billion in above the line expenses. For about 80,000 employees this means about $255,000 in expenses per employee.

I've never read a 10k before so I hope I'm doing it right.

Assuming all of those expenses go away with the employee (which will obviously not be the case), laying off 8,000 employees would save an average of about $2 billion per year.

This is the big takeaway from the 10k filing, and I wonder if it changed in the last two months: "Announces Share Repurchase Program increased to $20 billion".

But that's all expenses, not just direct employee costs. Like Salesforce buys an ad in the Superbowl, or spends money on Google ads, or buys electricity for its datacenters, etc.
Yeah, I know. I couldn't find an employee costs line. The best I could find was a stock options line.