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Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

I don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in Colorado, in a Denver/Boulder suburb. Not one of the most expensive places to live, though prices have been skyrocketing during the pandemic.

I see jobs all around me every week that go to the $150k-160k range. If I decided to take a Google or Amazon job I could easily break $200k, maybe more (including stock grants).

Developers in the US get paid more because demand has actually pushed our wages up to closer to what they're actually worth to an employer.

I've read estimates that a strong software engineer can add $500k-$1M of value per year to a company. You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?

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> You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?

I want Babel to continue to exist, even if it steered by an engineer who is not "the best in the world", if we take your assertion at face value (higher salary = better engineer).

Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously, I will posit that there is a least 1 Eastern European engineer who's better (based on HackerRank/leetcode/CodeJam stats), and is willing to accept a lower salary. So Babel might be better served recruiting there.

I suppose you can just summon such a person without effort? Recruiters get paid for a reason and we're talking about a situation where they don't even have the money for devs.

> Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously

Umm... Colorado?

We're more than a thousand miles as the crow flies or 20 hours of driving away from Silicon Valley.

More to the point: If the rest of the team is in US time zones, coordinating with an Eastern European developer is much harder. It means someone has to stay up really late or get up really early, and typically you still don't get much overlap.

Granted if such a brilliant developer who needed very little input from the rest of the team were to apply, they'd do well to hire them. But as the other comment mentions, how do you find such a developer on demand?

Just fyi google in boulder starts entry level around 150k, and senior engineers with 4 years tenure pull in 350+

Understood. Thanks for the specifics.

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