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What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

letsencrypt.org

191–200 of 394 posts

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#191
post #37

To 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…

Forget the salaries - you're getting REAMED by your laywers! $350,000 a year for legal and administrative is ridiculous, especially given that this is not for your salaried employees.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#192

Fascinating. Everyone here is complaining that 2M for 8 employees seems steep, but I think this seems really cheap. Admittedly, I work at Google, but we bat around the number of 400-500k per employee when discussing them here. 250k/ in SV seems really reasonably priced in comparison.

Maybe SV is not the best place then. Especially when they are working remotely. One thing is to make money and pay salary as you want, and another one is "we want such salaries, please donate". But don't get me wrong, I'm going to subscribe for monthly donation to them. They save a lot of my time monthly.

[deleted]

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#193
post #119

To Let's Encrypt: if you guys took bitcoins as donation I would give $10 in an instant. The friction of filling out this long Paypal form is just too high for $10... http://i.imgur.com/oZZWeuG.png (And, no, I don't have a Paypal account.) Make it easy to give, and you will receive more donations! Edit: I am not the only one who wants to donate BTC! Bitcoin was the number one request asked last year: https://twitter.c…

I'm in the same boat, though in my case I'd prefer Stripe for card processing rather than Paypal.

Stripe already has my card on file from other sellers, and I trust them where I don't especially trust Paypal.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#194
post #37

To 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…

$200k, including benefits, employment taxes, etc. is probably more like $150k in salary. It's not at all egregious for good programmers. I've had employees make near that in Ohio and have friends in the field who make considerably more. Also it's a budget, so I suspect it's intentionally padded to a small degree. While prices haven't converged on SV everywhere, it does have a ripple effect.

You're overestimating their final salary. Per-employee expenses are usually almost the salary all over again. Payroll taxes are a real bitch. It's probably closer to $110-$120k salary per employee.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#195
post #90
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infrast…

What do Verisign, RSA, Comodo and GlobalSign have in common? Not being in SF.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#196
post #183

If any LE staff are in here, I'd happily chip in on a Patreon.

You can donate directly, either once off or recurring monthly - https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

Maybe I'm odd, but I don't trust Paypal with a recurring monthly debit.

Their track record makes me doubt it would just be smooth and painless.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary I don't think people are _complaining_ about it, just expressing surprise/shock. It's one thing to read the anonymous "I know a guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" comments that you have to take with a grain of salt, but another thing to see an actual company's data. Eye opening for sure.

Yeah you have a point. I guess living here and having many friends who make more than 300K/yr as engineers (and some as much at 450K or 500K, and a few getting >1.2M), I've become numb to it.

Since we're talking, how much did you make at Netflix? 250k seems "entry level" there for a good engineer. Do managers make more?

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#200
post #37

To 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…

That's a pretty damn high salary regardless. But I think that's fine if most of that money end up paying for the engineers who do the actual work and not the management.

You have a general problem with engineering management?

Just like the old "if you don't get paid enough, go somewhere else" mantra, if your manager is shit - go somewhere else.

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