Reading the original post it seems to say 1.5K plus "tons of eng time", I'd imagine that it's the opportunity cost of the engineering time that ends up being by far the most expensive part in this and that the 1.5k figure was just the other fixed costs.

"Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark." Just curious what your thought process is to arrive at these numbers?

This should have been obvious, but buttresses my thesis: we do more than one ad. Run rate order of $140k for 2019. obviously $2k is not a significant expense, but that's per position per interview. So we pay that well more than once.

Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!.

We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.