To put this into perspective, assuming the average salary of the 8k employees is $125,000, that would only save 80 jobs.

The cost of employing someone is roughly double their salary, once bonuses, benefits, payroll taxes and overheads are considered.

Plus for many companies, RSUs can be an additional significant fraction or even multiple of base salary.

So it's a lot of money, but would pay for fewer jobs than you might think.

It's also possible - I have no idea - that the marketing featuring McConaughy made more money in new sales than it cost. I assume this was the expectation for the deal.

> The cost of employing someone is roughly double their salary, once bonuses, benefits, payroll taxes and overheads are considered.

This is for a good job. Temp agencies often pull about 30% of the total payment for each temp and permatemp they employ at another company. And they make a profit off of that overhead.

And I don't know about the jobs at Salesforce, but I find it odd that the person you're replying to assumed an average $125k per job. That's a really nicely compensated job, even if the $125k is total compensation, not just salary.

Temp agencies have very low overheads. They aren't even paying for the electricity and toilet paper their placements consume at work, let alone medical insurance.

Glassdoor says $138K base and $184K total comp at Salesforce for a SWE, with Senior SWE 10% higher.

From their 10k filing it looks like an average of $255k total expenses (including rent, etcetera) per employee.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35000125

Keep in mind fully loaded cost is approximately 2x salary. So maybe 40 jobs.

Can you cite this figure? I'd like to know where the additional funds go for an average employee. Is this including things such as material expenses (photocopy paper, utility bills, etcetera)? Because that's the only way I could imagine the 2x happening. And this will have huge variation depending on the type of job.

    - Federal taxes, 
    - health insurance, 
    - 401k matching,
    - other benefits big corporate SaaS companies offer,
    - office space

I wouldn't say 2x, but definitely salary is not the only cost of an employee.

It used to be 1.5x. And I was just wondering where the 2x came from. The non-office space expenses for me add up to maybe an additional 40%. If I was in a better health plan it might theoretically go up to 50%. Tack on expenses for the non-pension retirement plan manager and HR jobs to support employees and I can maybe get to 1.6x. But 2x+ doesn't happen until factoring in consumable and other expenses needed for my job. So I think that has to be a big part of it.

Feel free to use 1.5x, I just made up 2x. Either way, 125k/dev seems low.

Most of their employees are of course not devs, and some of the non-dev roles have greater salaries, while some are baristas.

I looked up their most recent 10k filing: https://s23.q4cdn.com/574569502/files/doc_financials/2023/q4...

From: https://investor.salesforce.com/financials/default.aspx

For the 3 months ending in January 31 2023 page 6 has $5.927 billion in operating expenses. Subtract out the $0.828 billion in restructuring costs for $5.099 billion in above the line expenses. For about 80,000 employees this means about $255,000 in expenses per employee.

I've never read a 10k before so I hope I'm doing it right.

Assuming all of those expenses go away with the employee (which will obviously not be the case), laying off 8,000 employees would save an average of about $2 billion per year.

This is the big takeaway from the 10k filing, and I wonder if it changed in the last two months: "Announces Share Repurchase Program increased to $20 billion".

But that's all expenses, not just direct employee costs. Like Salesforce buys an ad in the Superbowl, or spends money on Google ads, or buys electricity for its datacenters, etc.

Yeah, I know. I couldn't find an employee costs line. The best I could find was a stock options line.

Taxes, healthcare, social security, free massages and lattes?

The biggest overhead costs are: 1) employee health insurance 2) employment taxes 3) employee benefits like 401K matching 4) real estate costs for offices. Photocopy paper isn't even a rounding error on a rounding error.

In a production job like mine consumable costs are huge.

> that would only save 80 jobs

for one year

I think that's a good point. I also think another way to look at it would be to actually understand their marketing and sales spend and look at what this cost represents.

If they've ceased all marketing and just hope MM will take up the slack, it might be a dumb move. If they have too many software or back office or whatever people, the decision to let them go is completely decoupled from what they spend on marketing. It's not an either / or, it's different part of the business entirely.

People really hate that. Also the secretary is not a fan that their CEO does indeed provide 4000x the value.

CEO is in the unique position of being capable of providing 4000X the value, due to being a force multiplier on the entire company (It’s the job they hold, not skill, that makes it impossible for a random secretary to have as much value to a company). On one hand, this means it is indeed worth paying a lot of money to get the best CEO you can, as small differences in skill have outsized influences on the end result. On the other hand, even the CEOs who are of neutral or negative value compared to someone you could pay 10X less still get paid 4000X more than the secretary.

Anyway, long way of saying than general salaries are a race to paying as low an amount as you can to get someone of the needed skill, while CEO salaries are about paying more than strictly necessary due to the effect even a small difference has from your biggest productivity multiplier. And given that most people will never have the opportunity to enter a role where their pay starts being calculated that way, it’s unsurprising they find it unfair (even if it’s logical).