I'm an American who worked in Germany. I interviewed in the the Netherlands, but was horrified by how low pay was in the industry.

I meant to show that more as a benchmark. The claim was that Mozilla hires employees in low-cost countries.

I agree that the pay in The Netherlands is pretty bad for software devs compared to other countries with similar wealth (UK, Germany, US, etc), but I know that it’s much worse in e.g. Eastern European countries, which I also expect Mozilla to hire from.

Germany is not that much better than NL except for fintech and that pays well everywhere.

Why hire in eastern europe only? Mozilla hires the best from around the world.

It's more the American tech wages which are an outlier. Salaries in Europe are much lower but quite normal compared to the rest of the developed world.

Its speculation. Cost of benefits/rent/etc is expensive in the Bay Area, but no one is getting $25k worth of dental insurance or anything.

It's just an estimate for an based on my experience in the industry, but I think it's a reasonable one. I did estimate based on American costs though. For example, an entry-level software engineer at Google in the U.S. makes $188,000 according to https://www.levels.fyi/ . That's the amount of compensation that goes to the employee, though; that doesn't count employer taxes and the additional costs of overhead like office space. So I added a range of up to twice that much to account for overhead, to estimate what an employee costs to the employer.

There are a couple other factors - one extra factor is this is just for entry-level employees, another extra factor is that Mozilla probably doesn't pay quite as well as Google. I am not sure how large those factors are, but it's just an estimate and they work against each other, so I think the range is a reasonable guess. I would be surprised if it's very far off.