Hacker News Reader

Comment by freepor | Hacker News Reader

Yes but companies that are spending $60K on an employee aren’t spending $10K on their SaaS.

I don't know much about jobs outside of tech, but I know most of them at the entry level to a few years of experience in accounting, finance, real estate, etc. do not pay much over $60k (if that) and pretty much all of those jobs are going to use things like Salesforce or other expensive SAAS tools and software.

Salesforce "Enterprise" is $1800/user/year [0], and presumably large enterprises are negotiating better rates than the published ones. Every single employee would need to be using five and a half packages like this at full list price to hit $10k/year.

In Sales you would have SFDC plus some kind of enablement tool like Salesloft/Outreach plus a prospecting tool like Sales Navigator or DiscoverOrg plus enterprise Gmail plus a communication tool like Zoom; and then there's the analytics stuff, the HR/finance parts, etc...10k is probably way too high an estimate but 5k is believable for a B2B startup with a scaling sales team.

I won't quibble too much with the precision of the $10k number, which will vary widely.

But it's pretty obvious that a basic "customer support" combo like Office 365 + Okta + Zendesk + Intercom + Slack + Zenefits starts to add up to a meaningful percentage of the employee's take-home compensation. (Remember these are positions where $20/hr is a good rate.) And remember, the comparison figure for managers over 50 is roughly $0, which approximates the spend on these functions as far back ago as 2008.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com