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0 pointsskeeter20203y ago0 comments

>> A developer costs about 250K a year all up.

Gotta love HN math. Calculations to two decimal places, starting with a number plucked from the high end of a distribution with standard deviation of at least 100K.

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jdminhbg3y ago

> the high end of a distribution

What a dev costs is not the same as what an advertised salary for a dev is. This is closer to the middle of the distribution for dev costs in the US.

kiratp3y ago

Ok, so at 80K a year, that’s a 3x multiplier.

So annually you have to spend < 3*19 = 57 hours on your custom built source control and CI to come out on top.

Can’t be done outside of “we hired the OG devs of Gitlab/hub/etc”

grogenaut3y ago

don't forget benefits, hardware, support staff portion, and possibly office. We typically calculate 50% over... so that's 120k at a likely low end.

we run ghe at work and I know we spend 8 hours 4+ times a year for a test upgrade and then an upgrade from an eng that makes above either of your estimates in salary alone.

None of this includes all the work we're not doing to build new integrations or features in the ci system that we get for pay for the product. But we're not a scrappy startup either. We're paying down much of the tech debt from being a scrappy startup, it's not been cheap.

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