[pcthrowaway]

Maybe I'm out of touch with how things have changed over the last year or 2, but 2 years ago you'd struggle to find 1 great dev with 10 YoE for that price ($90K/yr)

Even if things have changed now, I can't imagine you'd find a great dev with 10 YoE for less than $80K/yr, and that's hiring globally (with the time zone issues that come with it). You can probably get 1 OK dev and 1 bad dev with 10 YoE for that price though, but you'd usually be better off just hiring one great dev than any other combination.

[tptacek]

It's not $90k/yr, it's something substantially less, because the fully loaded cost of an employee is much higher than their nominal salary.

[pcthrowaway]

I'm assuming you mean more?

[tptacek]

I just meant, you'd be paying these supposed engineers less than $90,000/yr.

[pcthrowaway]

Oh you're right, the salary the employee would be getting in this hypothetical would be less than the fully loaded cost.

So the person claiming you can get 2 "great" devs with 10 YoE for 90K/yr is effectively saying there are 2 "great" devs with 10 YoE somewhere in the world who are willing to work for like $35K/yr (or something in that realm less than 45K/yr).

I don't think the market has gotten that bad, but again, I'm not really paying attention to the job market right now.

[tptacek]

Right, I would just bring this back to, the fact that we're even entertaining this discussion illustrates how these hosting costs have basically nothing to do with this person's economic problem. With 2MM active users, if $90k/yr is breaking the bank, you haven't figured it out yet.

That's not to say it can't be figured out! But people telling them that they should reduce hosting costs are doing a disservice.

[Lionga]

You are out of touch with most parts of the world. Average income worldwide is about $10K a year. So 90K it about 9 times average income and in many parts of the world hires the top 10% of developers of that country.

But It will probably hire less then half of a US developer that then pisses all the other money away on overpriced AWS Servers, so that is right.

[pcthrowaway]

Average income is heavily skewed by unskilled workers who constitute the overwhelming majority of the workforce, as well as workers with less than a high school degree which constitute the overwhelming majority of the workforce.

I actually agree with you that 90K gets you top-10% of the developers in many countries, but you were saying that 45K would get you a great developer with 10 YoE.

Devs with 10 YoE are already probably less than 20% of developers, and there are devs with 10 YoE who aren't "great" developers. Perhaps this is my own western near-sightedness talking, but I'm under the impression that great developers may constitute fewer than 5% of developers in some of these countries in question (I assume due to a combination lower English proficiency which is important for working with Western employers, different cultural norms which cause many developers from some countries to adopt anti-patterns for working effectively with teams, and more limited access to reliable internet and better equipment, which could result in lengthened feedback loops during their learning process).

But my primary argument wasn't that you'd be unable to get a great dev with 10YoE, it was that you'd be unable to get two great devs with 10 YoE for 90K/yr, or 45K each, or as tpacek pointed out, more like 35K/yr take-home.