That's part of it, yes. The other part is that we pay engineers roughly market rate for our area, but we pay support significantly above that. Our philosophy is basically that everyone who works here should make a good living regardless of what their job is, so we're going to pay everyone that baseline. Certain employees (like engineers) might make more because the market demands it.

To be more specific, we start our support people at $53k/year and guarantee $10k/year raises for their first five years. We start engineers at $71k and guarantee the same $10k raises. So engineers are definitely making more, but in terms of the fully loaded costs to us, they're not that different.