Can the business model be charging for the certificate directly, just cheaper than others? I'm fine with that.
What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
81–90 of 394 posts
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 2M staffing budget in 2017 is for ten people, not eight. Was not clear enough in the blog post initially, apologies.
Actually it is for 8. Two of the people are being paid by another company. At least that's what I understood.
Heh, I'm pretty sure OP actually works for Let's Encrypt.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#83$2.06M for eight employees seems very steep
Would the business perform any better if they were paying $2.05M for 20 employees? That's $100k per employee including overhead. Salaries would be significantly less than $100k. On paper it may sound better, but you end up with extra administrative overhead, and lower quality work. Could twice as many junior staff perform as well as that many senior staff? My guess would be no.
Their staffing cost probably is on the higher end, but I'm guessing thats by design.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#84To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind: 1) That includes benefits 2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley 3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people. 4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you…
I would hope they have high caliber programmers and ops people, considering the problem space. Those don't come cheap. Can anyone comment on tax overhead for the company in SV? What net salary do 250k amount to? (net as in minus the tax for the company, not the employees income tax)
I've worked in finance for a medium-sized SF company and a small (~50 employee) startup in SV. Our standard assumption for 'all-in' employee cost was to add an additional 30% on top. For highly paid employees, this actually gets reduced a bit since FICA cuts off at $118k.
To get to $250k total outlay with an admittedly outdated spreadsheet, the salary would have to be $200k (benefit load of only 26%). Of course this depends greatly on PTO, Health Care, Worker's Comp, etc.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#85They are not paying $250k per employee. You have to factor in payroll taxes, paying accountants to keep books and CPAs to do taxes, benefits, and a multitude of other regulation-imposed payroll costs. All of this is to support salaries of around $125k - $150k. The same goes for pretty much any employer. If a fast food restaurant hires someone at $8/hr, it actually costs them around $16/hr to hire the employee. In a f…
In a "free market", I'd demand higher wages to cover medical expenses, my membership in the local road association so I could use the roads, etc. And I'd get it because I'd be in a union (as a programmer in this current non-free market, I don't feel super compelled to unionize, yet). But otherwise, yes, agreed.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#86To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind: 1) That includes benefits 2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley 3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people. 4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you…
> Edit: A bunch of people are saying "why not remote". I think they are in fact mostly remote, but they still have to compete with SV wages because really good people command those wages whether they are here or not.
This doesn't make sense. In the case of remote workers it's the San Francisco workers that have to compete with global offer/demand because nobody cares how much you are paying for housing.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#87To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind: 1) That includes benefits 2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley 3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people. 4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you…
I would hope they have high caliber programmers and ops people, considering the problem space. Those don't come cheap. Can anyone comment on tax overhead for the company in SV? What net salary do 250k amount to? (net as in minus the tax for the company, not the employees income tax)
There isn't as much as people bitch about, generally speaking you have a few items:
- FICA payroll tax - this is US wide, so not really more expensive in CA. - CA state payroll tax, this isn't that expensive, just a few percent. - Workers comp, could be cheaper in other states, but coders/office workers have cheap workers comp. - Health insurance, maybe a bit more expensive in CA
Basically hiring people isn't expensive because of the taxes, but because of benefits and just generally having a higher income rate. In my experience it was about 10%, and if you add health care another 10-15% so about 25% total overhead.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#88To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind: 1) That includes benefits 2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley 3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people. 4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you…
I can't speak for everyone on the project—I've only really interacted with one person—but I just wanted to say that $200k all-in is an absolute bargain for him (if that's in fact how it breaks down) given his skills, experience, and ability to operate/drive the project.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#89To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind: 1) That includes benefits 2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley 3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people. 4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you…
I can't speak for everyone on the project—I've only really interacted with one person—but I just wanted to say that $200k all-in is an absolute bargain for him (if that's in fact how it breaks down) given his skills, experience, and ability to operate/drive the project.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should consider running the service in Canada, where software engineer / programmer salaries are a third of that
or 90% of the US that is not SF/Silicon Valley
But they'd still be competing with Silicon Valley for top-end developers, who are going to be asking for a salary equivalent to their skills. You might save a little once you factor cost of living adjustments, though you'll also have to offset that with increased difficulty in finding the right person.
Folks who know security well enough to do this correctly are rare. You don't want to farm out critical X.509 infrastructure to the lowest bidder.