For slovenia taxes are progressive, above 10k a month is the highest bracket and taxes are 61%. If you want your employee to make 10k a month, your company pays 24k. If you want your employee to make 5k a month, the company pays almost 12k.

I think that’s a foolish comparison. When talking about these super high SF salaries, folks are talking about _gross_ salaries. Nobody will reject a higher salary because they’ll have to pay more taxes.

A lot of the conversation is about the value of the developers work being high enough to warrant higher salaries. With that argument we should look at gross salaries + taxes/fees paid by the employer on top of the gross salary.

Your personal tax rate is between you and the state.

I was not talking about a personal tax rate. My point was that employers can not pay anywhere near SF salaries because some places tax high salaries so severely. It is not a matter of employers being unwilling. A rich company can't just decide to pay people at SF levels and expect to create a local silicon valley.

One key part of the suggestion that might have been overlooked was to hire fewer engineers than you would have otherwise.

This could mean hiring 1 really amazing engineer instead of 2 or even 3 average ones depending on the realities of your local market, and pay them based on what it would have cost you to pay the 2 or 3 engineers combined.

This is always a choice you have available, unless you're bootstrapping and can't even afford to make the first hire at those rates, at which point you're probably not looking to compete on the global stage to begin with, so this suggestion doesn't really apply.

If a company knows that it'd actually cost 300k to hire the local kind of engineer that could make 150k in the Bay Area, that company is either going to move to the Bay Area or hire Bay Area-like engineers as remote contractors to get their 150k worth of engineer for 150k.

In Romania I'm paying about 45% of the gross salary to the state, and about 55% to my employee. The higher the salary, the worse that ratio gets.

Of course, the employee then has to pay VAT (19%) on everything they spend those 55% on.