And they also aren't working at letsencrypt.
I know a couple folks at Let's Encrypt in passing and they are at the top of my list of folks I would want writing code for me if I needed to trust it with, if not my life, most stuff up to that point.
(That is a comment on how easy LetsEncrypt makes generating certificates, something I very much appreciate).
However creating an world-class organization that provides certificates as easily as LE does... definitely not.
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.
EDIT: Per a follow up tweet, the staffing is expected to increase to 10 in 2017 (presumably plus the two from third parties), so it is /10, not /8, but not for the reason you described.
Could have been more clear in the post initially, but we have eight employees now and have budgeted for ten in 2017. I added a sentence to the blog post to make this more clear.
- School districts in SF and Oakland are short dozens of teachers -- imagine having sixty classrooms on the first day of school where there is no teacher. (e.g. http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Bay-Area-school-dist... from last year)
- San Francisco is basically building "dorms" for teachers to give them a place to live: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Mayor-and-SFUSD-have-a...
- Many teachers are leaving the area to go work in more affordable parts of the country: http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/teacher-pay/
I'd say, 'reflects the distribution of skills and positions available' rather than 'is really bad.' There is at least an order of magnitude more people capable of being minimally-acceptable public-school teachers than are capable of being minimally-acceptable Silicon Valley programmers.
SF teachers clearly need raises, and those can be funded by taxes from all those programmers that presumably benefit from having schools in their communities.
In fact there is no reason why teacher wages shouldn't keep up with the general state of the community where they live in.
I explained why: at least an order of magnitude more people are capable of meeting the minimal requirements to be teachers than are capable of meeting the minimal requirements to be developers, thus the former will always be less-well-paid than the latter.
> The sixty classrooms without teachers show otherwise.
They may not be due to pay but due to union rules. And, of course, even if teachers should make more that doesn't mean that they should make much
> In fact there is no reason why teacher wages shouldn't keep up with the general state of the community where they live in.
Are you saying that teachers should make a mean or median wage? I think that's a little silly, as it's hardly a profession requiring high innate talent and intensive study, unlike engineering, medicine, law, religion. Frankly, I think a welder or a plumber should be paid more than a teacher.
But it shouldn't matter what you & I think teachers should be paid: their wages should be set by the market, as should everyone's. That's the closest thing to fair we'll ever be able to get.
For the work that they are doing (including the overhead of an employee -- health, benefits, taxes, etc), this seems cheap.
I'm sorry but this isn't "deep crypto". Very technical jobs that need a very good job done, since a lot of people depend on it? Sure. But they're not inventing anything new here. With all due respect, signing certificates is something you can grab from the openssl library, rewrite in a memory-safe language, have the community look at, and you're good to go.
I'm not saying I think 200k is too much. There are many reasons why it adds up to that much. I just think the technical requirements are not the reason for those wages.
(If it makes you feel any better, I earn less than you working as a software developer in the UK.)
Rule of thumb in the US is that you add about 40% to a salary to get the total cost to the company to support that salary. And that's just taxes and basic benefits. Add a pension and 401k with matching, and it goes higher.