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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

> 225K per employee

That is the cost of these employees to their employer ("fully loaded"). The fully loaded cost is typically about twice the employee's nominal compensation, which would be ~$113k. This is about 60% of entry level comp at a FAANG company and about 35% of mid-career comp. [1]

Mozilla employs a lot of people who are willing to work under market rate to do a job they believe in, but I doubt they would be able to get and retain the people they need if they offered substantially less.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Apple,Amazon...

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My last company uses 1.35x salary as the fully loaded cost for engineers. Healthcare and office space costs don't scale linearly with salary, for example.

When you say "salary" here, are you using it as shorthand for total compensation? As in, including equity and bonus?

Just cash (so base + bonus).

> 1.35x salary as the fully loaded cost for engineers ... Just cash (so base + bonus)

That's going to depend a lot by how the company does comp. For example, equity was ~43% of my total comp last year, which means you'd need 1.75x just for for base+bonus+stock. And that's before considering taxes, healthcare, and office space.

For both the public companies and the startups I've worked for, equity comp comes out of a pool that directly dilutes the shareholders, whereas cash comp and bonuses are both operational expenses that impact EBITDA. Depending on how cynical you are, you might think that boards and shareholders look more carefully at EBITDA performance than the option pool so managers are more inclined to care about the former than the latter.

SV (and to a slightly lesser extent NY) compensation. not worldwide. Having worked in SV for the past few years and now earning a european salary, its no where near same ballpark.

and yes, I called it personnel cost vs salary, because I wasn't talking about the fully loaded cost.

if people are willing to work at startups in SV for $150-$180K salaries (with significant experience, and I had enough offers from my time in SV to get a good handle on the market) those same people if they wanted to work at mozilla would earn similar amounts. but these are higher end engineers earning the $180K at a startup. mozilla has a significant number (article I just read said about half) of its employees work remotely.

For what it's worth the levels.fyi number is ~10% low for me, and I'm in Boston (US East Coast).

I agree that outside the US comp is generally substantially lower. But given Mozilla's history and the people they would want to hire, I think it would be extremely difficult for them to move to a model where they primarily employ developers in cheaper countries.

Indeed. Those developers would just be picked up by FAANG instead.

What the hell, average mid-career software compensation for non-FAANG companies is ~$350k?!

Are you joking?

Parent's comment was explicitly about FAANG companies.

But similar numbers apply to companies that are competing for talent with the FAANGs.

> companies that are competing for talent with the FAANGs

Which I think solidly includes Mozilla.

Yes, that is rather the point. ;)

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