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Comment by 80fj0348i | Hacker News Reader

Most of the costs to provide digital services are salaries for the employees. You need engineers, support staff, lawyers, and some supporting roles like finance and security/compliance to meet the legal and contractual obligations of the service.

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Sure, but remember that Verisign manages a total of 179 million domains. They also have less than 1,000 employees. Can they really have a salary cost of >$530K per employee? It's obviously the executive team that pockets most of that cost.

Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate overhead and inefficiencies.

...$530K cost to employ is actually not unheard of for a US based software company, actually. (i.e. including office space, equipment, healthcare, benfits and corporate taxes). Maybe slightly on the high side though.

Obviously is not aware of the bonus system in America.

True. I'm not aware of a $500K+ bonus system for "engineers, support staff, lawyers, and some supporting roles like finance and security/compliance" in America.

My guy, SWE ICs are making high six to low seven figure annual TCs nowadays in SF. Not exaggerating. RSUs and ESPPs be crazy these last couple of years.

Fyi overhead often add anything up to 100% to the basic salary cost. Office space, hiring, travel, various forms of insurance, these things add up.

And serving DNS for the root or a big zone is technically challenging. You want 100% uptime despite DDoS attacks, that's not simple.

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