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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Drawing a precise boundary around "Chrome" is hard, since many people work on it part time, or are associated with tangentially related projects, like the skia graphics engine, v8 javascript engine, etc.

However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code direct to chromium in the last week:

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/pulse

And I would guess the Chrome team is probably 3-5x that, since many people may not be working on code, may not commit directly, or might be working on big things on branches and didn't commit anything this week. Also, that doesn't count work on external dependencies, which are counted as "autoroll bots".

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> However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code direct to chromium in the last week:

This also includes all people from outside the org (Google), right?

I found this but I think it's for Chrome? There are also things like v8 engine.

> The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.) Feb 22, 2019

I don't really think it's fair to extrapolate github contributors into FTE employees paid by Google, let alone to throw out a '3-5x' number on top.

Manual inspection of todays commits shows that nearly all of them are @chromium.org email addresses, which usually means a google full time engineer. There are some from other companies (microsoft, intel, nvidia). None from random hobbyists that I saw.

OK and that makes perfect sense.

But then saying "therefor other days I expect those other engineers were @chromium", not so much. I expect that the vast majority of contributors are making ~1 commit and then never again.

It also doesn't take into account that the project is over a decade old and many people who have committed to it as FTEs are no longer doing so.

3000 engineers * $200k average total comp = $600M. It's in the same ballpark as mozilla's total revenues.

Average total comp for an FAANG engineer in the US is more like $450k, and last time I heard numbers, Chrome and adjacent teams were more like 4,000 people.

Which average is that? Don't think it's median W2 income.

Yeah it seems a touch low. I'm not at one of the big boys and $200k is more like base salary then total comp. RSUs show up on a W2.

I guess Mozilla engineers are paid quite a bit less. They hire the people with a conscience, so don't need to pay the 'do evil' salary premium...

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