[fragmede]

> I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company

$33m/year is only 33 fully loaded software developers including all overhead like HR and managers and office space, and also a cloud hosting bill.

33 really isn't that many.

[johnbellone]

I'd be surprised if the average package for SWE is $1M/year (fully loaded).

[YetAnotherNick]

Generally package is around half of what company spends per extra engineer. And $500k average for a tech heavy product company doesn't sound too far off.

[rafram]

> $500k average for a tech heavy product company doesn't sound too far off.

Tailscale puts salary ranges on their job postings. The salaries aren’t bad, but no, they aren’t $500k.

[YetAnotherNick]

Didn't knew that. It's significantly lower than $500k.

[nialv7]

Holy hell I need to ask for a raise.

[klooney]

When people say they get 500k they mean they get paid 200k in salary and got 300k in RSUs, with the details mixed around the edges. ICs aren't getting 500k salary except in a few rare cases.

[xeromal]

Funny enough, you could double that to 70 engineers and that's still a TINY amount of engineers.

[MrDarcy]

This is just wrong. What exactly do think companies are spending 500k on per engineer beyond the TC package?

[andruby]

HR, marketing, sales, management, office space, servers, licenses, insurance, etc.

It seems on the high end, but not too unrealistic.

[hug]

It’s wildly and hugely unrealistic.

The rule of thumb that employees actually cost a business roughly twice their salary is based on two things:

1. Retention. Hiring costs are “huge”, and so if you have a higher or lower average retention, may make up a disproportionate cost compared to salary. Ramp up time and institutional knowledge loss is no joke either.

2. A spread of average wages. 500k is not average, and a huge number of the costs are relatively fixed. $1,000 a month worth of software licensing isn’t an uncommon number and is fully 1/3 of the salary of a $3k a month or $36k/year junior clerk. It’s peanuts when you look at it next to a $500k/year salary. It may be that the clerk is, all in, costing the company 3x their salary after indemnity insurance and so on. The dev will never reach 10%.

[purplepatrick]

Non-salary cost such as payroll taxes, benefits, workers comp, training, equipment, space add another 25-50% typically.

[jesseendahl]

I haven't traditionally seen these areas of spend rolled into Eng costs in the budgeting process.

[Loudergood]

US Health Insurance is stupid expensive as well.

[xeromal]

It's really not at scale. It's on the order of 500$ a month per dev for "gold" level care for a company of 50 people. I'm sure it's less the larger you get.

[hiddencost]

Nope. 2x total comp is standard fully loaded cost.

[throwaway98797]

office space of course!

[udev4096]

This might be true for HFT companies. They usually start at 200-300k and mid senior engineers probably make close to a million

[anilakar]

33M would be 33 software consultants each making 250k a year.