Yeah as a reference - I do a lot of this type of planning for non-equity employees and our number is 37% right now (site costs + US payroll taxes & benefits + hardware + incidentals).

Thanks for the reference. I've heard numbers thrown out but never anything asserted as an actual researched number.

Yeah the org I work with has an interesting setup where the employees are employed by the parent organization and then we have dozens of projects as legal entities but no staff on their books. So to calibrate the passthrough cost that we charge those projects, we do a big analysis every quarter of all of our expenses for tax, 401k matching, 'staff development', non-capital hardware purchases, health/dental/vision, life insurance, etc. etc. So it's a pretty robust number. For highly paid employees over ~$200k, it's probably more like 34% since a bunch of that stuff doesn't scale with salary, but lower employees are closer to 40% so the blended rate covers a "typical" company.

Ah, fair, good point. 30% is what I've heard as well, but I did forget about that when commenting. I do still think that 300k is pretty generous even for engineers, which won't be the entirety of the cuts and so the average would be lower.