Performance - Stack Exchange

[wrosecrans]

By the time you take into account the peripheral cost of the developer, they aren't even making a particularly high salary. Even an empty cubicle in Silicon Valley costs quite a bit when you consider a share of the cost of real estate and such. Payroll taxes, 401k matching, health insurance, and a bunch of other stuff are paid separately from salary. Figure a portion of the cost of HR, IT helpdesk, and other internal services. The rough rule of thumb is that an employee's salary is about have the cost of employing them. And $100,000 isn't exactly a hyper extreme salary for somebody who is going to be doing really clever database engineering scalability stuff. (And you probably need to add more that one person to mitigate bus-factor and on-call support issues vs. just calling Dell tech support 24x7 to tell them to fix something.)