[inoop]

> you could get yourself 25 top-notch engineers without AI PhD

Not in the US though. According to levels.fyi, an SDE2 makes ~275k/year at Uber. Hire 25 of those and you're already at $6.875MM. In reality you're going to have a mix of SDE1, SDE2, SDE3, and staff so total salaries will be higher.

Then you gotta add taxes, office space, dental, medical, etc. You may as well double that number.

And that's just the cost of labor, you haven't spun up a single machine and or sent a single byte across a wire.

[silverquiet]

Work from home doesn't mean that home has to be in the US.

[cthalupa]

> Then you gotta add taxes, office space, dental, medical, etc. You may as well double that number.

Economies of scale help a bit with this for larger companies, so it's probably not quite double for Uber, but yeah, not too far off as a general rule of thumb. Probably a 75% increase on the employee facing total comp to get fairly close to the company's actual cost for the employee.

[cdchn]

"and have another mil left over for metal" was the part accounting for hardware, infrastructure, etc.

And you can fudge the employee salary a mil or two either way, but the point is that spending that much on a team to build something isn't infeasible or even unreasonable.