$200K per person staffing budget isn't $200K per person salary. Benefits, employer share of payroll taxes, and other things that don't show up in top-line salary are in there. You are a lot bigger cost to your employer than your gross salary.

Just to add on, usually salary is ~3/4 of cost to the company, so ~$150k is the average salary which seems completely inline for quality talent with experience

Yep. Here at UC, the non-salary costs can be in excess of 60% of salary.

We can take that to an extreme: <br> (from 2015) http://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/

"...the CRS (Congressional Research Service) report says the cost of keeping a single American soldier there (Afghanistan) this year is an eye-watering $3.9 million..." <br> I don't think there's too many millionaires coming back from Afghanistan.

"Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”

- Sebastian Junger

And in the federal govt it's at least that percentage... Anecdotally, in one department within the DoD, it's ~90%, which sounds insane.

> Anecdotally, in one department within the DoD, it's ~90%, which sounds insane.

If you consider how little uniformed military personnel are paid and how high the other costs associated with them are to start with, I'm actually not all that surprised that somewhere in some specialized area in the DoD this ratio is reached.

This was interesting when I was in. I was making $25k a year as a corporal, but I was saving almost all of it because I wasn't paying for rent, utilities, health insurance, food, or the gym. My expenses were Internet, cell phone, and car insurance / gas. That was it.

I make three times as much in the civilian world, but I'm saving less.

They also probably don't include BAH and BAS as salary since they are considered reimbursements. Just as you wouldn't include cost of barracks as part of your salary if you lived there. BAH and BAS are a very large part of compensation.

Why? I don't think it is surprising. Throwaway account, but when I interviewed at FB and Apple I got offers for over $1m/4yr total comp, which is $250k/yr. Is Let's Encrypt doing less valuable work? Should the employees voluntarily give up compensation for some reason?

My previous startup job was similar in salary to the FB offer, though without the guaranteed RSUs (>300k/4yr).

When I look at the public salary data it seems low

Yeah you have a point. I guess living here and having many friends who make more than 300K/yr as engineers (and some as much at 450K or 500K, and a few getting >1.2M), I've become numb to it.

Since we're talking, how much did you make at Netflix? 250k seems "entry level" there for a good engineer. Do managers make more?

h1b data is a good source. Especially for Netflix since almost all their compensation is in salary, rather than benefits/stock/etc like a lot of other tech companies.

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Netflix+Inc&job=&city=&year...

A good Engineer earning $140k as a base salary in SF shouldn't be a surprise (if it is, you're quite out of touch with the market) and then you have to add in the other costs companies have to budget for (benefits, stock, expenses, etc) plus it's clearly an average over the employees (so will include some that make much more and some that make less).

Honestly if it's surprise/shock it's _still_ a bit strange.