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by summerlight 461 days ago
> 20 developers at $150k each = $3M

It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
1 comments
ItsBob 461 days ago
$250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.

The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.

I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)

I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.

Anyway, this was all just a bit of fun :)

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summerlight 461 days ago
> $250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.

Still you need to spend at least $250K (which direct compensation would be close to $150K) to hire a competent browser dev. And I'm not speaking about SF... Well you can have better cost efficiency outside American metros, but the reality is that experienced browser devs are rare outside those areas.

> I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc.

Not objecting that disruptions can be done with a small focused team. But here we're talking about dealing with massive complexity, not an emerging market. You cannot "redefine" the problem here, the ecosystem is mess and we've got to live with it for a good time...

> I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.

You will be surprised to know how small the core engine parts are to the total code base. You may argue that most of those are not necessary and perhaps half of them are pretty much ad-hoc complexity but the rest have their own reason to exist. And the new browser engine developers typically learn this hard way then decides to fall back to Chromium. I've seen this several times.

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