[labcomputer]

Yes, but you do need a few really good senior people. If your salary table has a hard cap at 150k (and no equity to make up for it), you can’t hire those people.

You also have a hard time hiring good mid-levels because you can’t possibly pay them as much as the top people, right? You also have the problem that some of your SWEs might make more than their managers, and that’s just unconscionable.

So what do you do? Have a “secret bonus” program that even most people in HR don’t know about? Hiring becomes tricky: Better make sure you don’t have a live one on the line when the only HR with need-to-know is on vacation.

[AlotOfReading]

One of the points I'm trying to communicate is that there are skilled people in most parts of the world. They're less common outside SV, but that doesn't matter unless you're trying to hire at big tech campus scale. So you focus your much smaller efforts on recruiting those people with a good environment, give them the tools to produce work they're proud of. If you pay what they'll be happy with, it's almost always going to be vastly less than big tech pays.

That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.

Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.