[kiratp]

A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost.

49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour.

29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours

If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself.

This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.

[skeeter2020]

>> A developer costs about 250K a year all up.

Gotta love HN math. Calculations to two decimal places, starting with a number plucked from the high end of a distribution with standard deviation of at least 100K.

[jdminhbg]

> the high end of a distribution

What a dev costs is not the same as what an advertised salary for a dev is. This is closer to the middle of the distribution for dev costs in the US.

[kiratp]

Ok, so at 80K a year, that’s a 3x multiplier.

So annually you have to spend < 3*19 = 57 hours on your custom built source control and CI to come out on top.

Can’t be done outside of “we hired the OG devs of Gitlab/hub/etc”

[grogenaut]

don't forget benefits, hardware, support staff portion, and possibly office. We typically calculate 50% over... so that's 120k at a likely low end.

we run ghe at work and I know we spend 8 hours 4+ times a year for a test upgrade and then an upgrade from an eng that makes above either of your estimates in salary alone.

None of this includes all the work we're not doing to build new integrations or features in the ci system that we get for pay for the product. But we're not a scrappy startup either. We're paying down much of the tech debt from being a scrappy startup, it's not been cheap.

[mettamage]

> A developer costs about 250K a year all up.

I currently cost more like 80K in euro's if I reason from my employer's side. So tell me, how are you getting to the 250K exactly?

Europe exists as well and even in the US there are enough companies that don't pay FAANG salaries.

[trowawee]

Even if you throw out SF salaries as a wild outlier, this isn't actually that ridiculous. An average quality mid-career dev (5-10 years exp.) in a second tier market like Chicago/Denver/Austin/Boston can pretty easily make 170-200 in cash. "[A]ll up" is the key here tho; there's a big non-salary component in the US that doesn't exist in Europe. Tack on health insurance and the total cost to the company will easily blow past 250 right there. Plus, you're probably giving them some equity and a yearly bonus.

I'll be honest, it does sometimes blow my mind to see how low salaries are over there when I look at job postings and Who's Hiring and the like. I'm jealous of a lot of things Europeans take for granted, but it's wild to me to see senior positions in major European capitals paying the amount that I made two years out of a bootcamp.

[MrFoof]

Thing is, even in those 2nd tier markets, you're still looking more towards the top. I say this as someone having spreadsheets "I shouldn't have" from folks towards the top of acquisitions into larger companies that do pay well. Companies you've at least heard of, but certainly aren't disrupting a market. No, they're not the ones at the top of your list, but a fair number you'd consider respectable.

There's a lot of companies paying 2/3rds of that cash.

Then there's the bad ones, that are still trying to pay half. Seriously. They're not places you even realize exist, and if you went in for an interview you'd instantly sense you're not where you want to be. Places where you watch managers basically bully interviewees to look for immediate subservience, because they want to ensure they'll "yessir" without hesitation. These places absolutely exist. In all of those markets. I've seen quite a number of them.

-- -----

I know, this isn't what we all try to aspire to here, but I say this as someone with far too much experience with Boston (very specifically), Denver and Austin over the past 20+ years. I've had the "good but not amazing" and many "bad" companies as clients of mine. I've talked to their staff. I've done my damnedest to ensure the good eggs know where they stand in the market, and help them move on if they wanted to.

HN very much looks at 75th percentile on up. But once you go down the ladder in the compensation offered, you'll encounter a ton of people where $170-200K salary or salary+bonus would be a 20-30% bump in their comp in those markets. Then you get to the bad places, where they're legit making half and feel thankful for it.

[jdminhbg]

US salaries don’t include employer payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement matching, etc. Total cost can easily be 2x advertised salary.

[meghan_rain]

Don't tell them it becomes 40k after taxes or people here won't believe you.

[Petersipoi]

Software Engineers work for $40k net in Europe? Genuinely asking.

[deng]

Yes. In Germany, if you are a good earner, you pay 42% taxes, plus obligatory healthcare about 900EUR/month, pension fund and unemployment insurance (also all obligatory). So if you earn 100k (which is already a high salary in Germany), you usually end up with less than half net. I know this sounds crazy to US citizens, but this system comes with several advantages which I wouldn't want to miss.

[mettamage]

To be honest, I feel Europeans are simply being underpaid compared to US FAANG salaries. Not necessarily compared to EU FAANG salaries as they are lower and even if that's case, it's not glaringly obvious (to me at least).

[mettamage]

Yep, me, there's nothing that pays more to be honest. If you're hiring and it pays significantly more, I'm interested.

[siva7]

Yes. And that's already mid-career salary.

[XajniN]

Only if they have a good salary

[strken]

A developer:

in the US

in specific rich cities in California, New York, Texas, Washington, and Colorado

at a handful of tech companies which are currently bedevilled by lay-offs

averaged across all roles

GitLab doesn't have regional pricing.

[tjoff]

That assume that gitlab is friction free and takes zero time to use?

Maybe something like gitea+teamcity solution is better and cheaper and has less opportunity cost?

I like gitlab, but it feels they have been walking in the wrong direction for many many years and the consequences are starting to pile up.

[gbourne]

I think the point is too many times developers are a penny wise and a pound foolish when it comes to build vs buy. Because they can build, and it is often fun if you haven't done it before.

Though I often don't take my own advice, I try to ask is what I'm about to build core to our ROI/product, is there an existing solution that gets us 80% there, and yes, what is the cost.

If it is not core to the business, won't drive revenue, and cost are not outrageous, which is a company by company truth, then I much prefer to spend X time building new product than recreating an existing product/tool.

One final point - don't forget to consider the maintenance costs, which in the long term often greater then the initial investment. If your CI goes down, you just blew away and savings you were planning on.

[lazypenguin]

There are also maintenance costs with the off the shelf solutions. E.g. Gitlab self-hosted runners don’t handle very large artifacts well and frequently caused CI to timeout. We had to roll our own artifact management system.

In general I agree with you off-the-shelf is usually better but sometimes a custom tailored solution rather than a generic system can be better.

[zeusk]

Their solution is not a monthly recurring event.

[kiratp]

Their solution will require a developer to ssh into VMs to update, debug, upscale etc.

[megous]

That's about ~1-2 hours a year and already has to be done, because that VM has been used to run other dev services. Also with simple solutions, the benefit is that there's usually nothing to debug. It just works.

And the cost of that has to be compared to cost of gitlab subscription and other gitlab related headaches.

[jayd16]

Yeah, now its 24/7 ops headache.

[zeusk]

like gitlab isn't?

[megous]

Hehe, even at US prices we'd break even after half a year.

Average salary where I live is $21k/yr with average devs taking maybe $25-40k/yr. Top jobs being ~$65k