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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

It's also kind of odd because even a junior engineer has to cost a company around 10 grand a month in salary, taxes, and other costs. So if the company thinks it makes you 10% more effective it seems like it should be an easy choice. So either the companies are shooting themselves in the foot limiting spending or they aren't seeing the productivity boost.

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10 grand a month for a junior is absolutely ridiculous in most of the world including large swats of the western world.

Between all the benefits, taxes, and the infrastructure the company needs costs rise pretty quickly.

No, they really don't, it's a ridiculous claim.

They were talking about what it costs the company, not just the salary. There are taxes, insurances, equipment costs, etc.

10k might be a bit too high, but it's far from "absolutely ridiculous" amounts of being too high. An employee with a 5k salary can easily cost the employer 7-8k

I took into account all of that. Still ridiculous.

In the US, it’s really difficult to live a middle class lifestyle if you’re not making at least low to mid 100k. I don’t see any starting software salaries at good companies below 100k even in the Midwest.

Sure in the US. But people are throwing token caps in 500, 1000, 2000 dollar range here. That is a very significant expense on top of salary, taxes and benefis. It's only justifiable if they observe 20% 30% or more productivity increases across the board.

If you have huge salaries, yeah sure 500 dollars its okay even if you only get 5 10% more productive.

Fully loaded employee cost is typically around 2x their actual salary. Junior employees making only $60k/yr is absolutely nothing. It’s lowish even in most parts of the western world.

You have people in Spain and Portugal hiring juniors at 25k per year.

The software market has trimodal salary distributions.

You can also get cheap devs in Central or South America or Eastern Europe too. Doesn’t make it untrue that large parts of the world have junior devs much more expensive than that.

What large parts of the world? Some places in Canada, the US, an handfull of countries in Europe, Autralia plus a few hotspots in SEA?

> What large parts of the world?

The software development world and ecosystem. I’d say all of the US, major parts of Canada, and major parts of Europe constitute a large part of software developers.

there is likely curve of diminishing productivity return

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