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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

The Fix The Internet incubator doesn't look like very much money is involved. A $2500 stipend for participants, a top prize of $25,000, not that much money. Whereas layoffs of 250 people will save maybe $50 - $100 million a year.

Of course, perhaps they will also cut future funding to this incubator, and it's just a different timing that they announce it.

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They're paying their devs 200-400 grand a year? Jesus.

I was laid off and had 10 years of tenure. Salary, bonus, and benefits amounted to a TC of around 300

Mozilla’s layoffs were to get rid of the highly paid engineers, IMO. We have new talent coming in fresh and loose for a bunch less.

We also have a lot of cash in the bank. Mozilla is wealthy. CFO was asked to increase runway.

That makes sense (as explanation, not necessarily justification). In general, this remote era is a "great" way to push dev salaries down, even for organizations that were already decently remote like Mozilla.

Salary, bonus, healthcare, dental, 401K, office space, taxes, equipment, ... employees are not cheap. That figure would be competitive in the Bay Area for quality dev work.

I think I found the solution, not basing yourself in one of the highest cost of living areas.

Mozilla hires devs all across the world, many in countries where developers are much cheaper than in the USA.

So then where does the 200k - 400k come from? That salary would be outrageous for software devs over here in .nl, let alone for a non-profit.

I'm an American who worked in Germany. I interviewed in the the Netherlands, but was horrified by how low pay was in the industry.

I meant to show that more as a benchmark. The claim was that Mozilla hires employees in low-cost countries.

I agree that the pay in The Netherlands is pretty bad for software devs compared to other countries with similar wealth (UK, Germany, US, etc), but I know that it’s much worse in e.g. Eastern European countries, which I also expect Mozilla to hire from.

Germany is not that much better than NL except for fintech and that pays well everywhere.

Why hire in eastern europe only? Mozilla hires the best from around the world.

It's more the American tech wages which are an outlier. Salaries in Europe are much lower but quite normal compared to the rest of the developed world.

Its speculation. Cost of benefits/rent/etc is expensive in the Bay Area, but no one is getting $25k worth of dental insurance or anything.

It's just an estimate for an based on my experience in the industry, but I think it's a reasonable one. I did estimate based on American costs though. For example, an entry-level software engineer at Google in the U.S. makes $188,000 according to https://www.levels.fyi/ . That's the amount of compensation that goes to the employee, though; that doesn't count employer taxes and the additional costs of overhead like office space. So I added a range of up to twice that much to account for overhead, to estimate what an employee costs to the employer.

There are a couple other factors - one extra factor is this is just for entry-level employees, another extra factor is that Mozilla probably doesn't pay quite as well as Google. I am not sure how large those factors are, but it's just an estimate and they work against each other, so I think the range is a reasonable guess. I would be surprised if it's very far off.

Tough when the best talent is in that high COL metropolitan area.

Silicon Valley is so far up its ass that they can't see the light of day. There is good talent in the high COL metro area, but that doesn't mean all of the best talent is there. And it's definitely not all cultivated there.

At most it's just brain drain from around the world (and around the U.S.) due to capital concentration NOT talent concentration.

There's this belief that anybody who isn't willing to move to high COL metro couldn't cut it there because having a worldview outside of living in SF or similar isn't something that can be fathomed.

"At most it's just brain drain from around the world (and around the U.S.) due to capital concentration NOT talent concentration."

Brain drain implies relative talent concentration - are you sure this is what you mean to say?

Look - I hate SV and don't live there. The reality is unavoidable: for software, the best talent lives in the Bay. It's not that deep.

Myth or reality? The world vs sf and the valley?

I'll go with the world.

history has been with the valley (so far ...)

Money has been with the valley.

Microsoft has brilliant engineers and is in Seattle, for example.

That's interesting topic

What about Tencent? and things like HK's HFT

What about competitive security? here's huge variety in countries e.g 2 very strong teams are Poland based

Depends highly on where they are, but Bay Area engineering compensation (salary, bonus, stock) is indeed 200-400k. As others have mentioned, there are other costs such as insurance, 401k, etc, but yeah software engineering salaries are very high and if you want top talent, you need to be competitive with FAANG.

Not in just salaries, but that estimate would include all the costs associated with an employee.

I find the crowdsourced data at levels.fyi to be a good reality check on what dev compensation is like at large tech companies.

Let's take three others that make well-known desktop browsers: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Google,Microsoft&track...

According to that data, senior developers at Apple (ICT4), Google (L5) and Microsoft (64) make on average $320k, $352k, and $225k. Their fully-loaded costs (benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc) to the company will of course be even higher.

These are examples of peer companies Mozilla is competing against for employees. As I explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24138083 , Mozilla does not try to attract people solely via compensation. However, you can only offer so much less before you're no longer able to hire and retain the talent you need.

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