$2.06M for eight employees seems very steep
I know in addition to salary there are other "hidden" costs like health care etc, but even taking that into account their employees must be taking home a pretty significant wage.
What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
31–40 of 394 posts
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#32"Hardware/Software" and "Hosting/Auditing" seem to be weird things to lump together.
I wonder what software they pay for.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Approximately 100% salary overhead is pretty standard, so eight $125k employees plus infrastructure and office costs sounds reasonable.
8 x $125K would be $1M, not the $2M that is currently being spent on employees. Edit: Missed the first part of that, I apologise. 100% overhead doesn't seem reasonable per employee to me though.
[deleted]
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#34The services of Let's Encrypt, let alone the cause they stand for, is well worth a small recurring donation. I think this is totally reasonable to pledge even $2/mo.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#35I'm quite surprised - $2.06 on staffing seemed steep, so obviously read on as I was thinking that there must be a lot of employees. But 8? OK, I'm just a teacher, and I earn around £30k a year... not the kind of figures I've seen bandied about on here for graduate programmers who seem to be pulling in 8-10 times that for their first job... So I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the payroll (which I doubt would ha…
With things such as tax and healthcare it typically costs a business 1/4 to 1/3 more per employee than their wage, so each person here is perhaps on $180-200k assuming a completely even split. Considering this is deep crypto in San Francisco it's not too surprising.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#36I'm quite surprised - $2.06 on staffing seemed steep, so obviously read on as I was thinking that there must be a lot of employees. But 8? OK, I'm just a teacher, and I earn around £30k a year... not the kind of figures I've seen bandied about on here for graduate programmers who seem to be pulling in 8-10 times that for their first job... So I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the payroll (which I doubt would ha…
Yes, that seems about right. I also do not get paid nearly that much, but the location (San Francisco), caliber of required employees and the overhead of benefits certainly adds up.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#37To 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 pay for engineers with security expertise.
As someone who runs a business and has to hire talent, I can say that I'd consider myself lucky to get such a team for such a great price.
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.
Edit2: As has been pointed out multiple times, the blog post was not clear, and it is actually 200K per person, all in.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#38$2.06M for eight employees seems very steep
Approximately 100% salary overhead is pretty standard, so eight $125k employees plus infrastructure and office costs sounds reasonable.
Can you explain why there would be 100% salary overhead? This seems quite high as a non business owner/operator.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#39I'm quite surprised - $2.06 on staffing seemed steep, so obviously read on as I was thinking that there must be a lot of employees. But 8? OK, I'm just a teacher, and I earn around £30k a year... not the kind of figures I've seen bandied about on here for graduate programmers who seem to be pulling in 8-10 times that for their first job... So I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the payroll (which I doubt would ha…
> an average of $250k seem normal to others on here?
For the work that they are doing (including the overhead of an employee -- health, benefits, taxes, etc), this seems cheap.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#40I'm quite surprised - $2.06 on staffing seemed steep, so obviously read on as I was thinking that there must be a lot of employees. But 8? OK, I'm just a teacher, and I earn around £30k a year... not the kind of figures I've seen bandied about on here for graduate programmers who seem to be pulling in 8-10 times that for their first job... So I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the payroll (which I doubt would ha…
"plus two full time staff that are employed by other entities (Mozilla and EFF)"
So, that's 10. $206k/employee The accepted amount of benefits & costs per employee is around 35%, so now we're at $134k/employee. This is not a high salary for an engineer in San Francisco. In fact, I'd say it's pretty damn low.