Think from the perspective of the non profit. $19m/year is a lot of money to raise year after year from donations.

What’s the game plan if the donations stops coming in ?

Silicon Valley is not the only place to find engineers who know what they're doing. Some of us want to stay in our home country and/or don't want to jump through the hoops that American tech companies demand.

Well I don’t get paid to hack, it’s a hobby and sometimes I’m and entrepreneur so I don’t have the same bias as thinking all devs should be making $500k+. I actually think of cost controls and how to build more with less, so kind of polar opposite motives.

Cheap is also a relative concept. I have a guy on full time that I pay $1500 a month. It’s more than twice than he’s ever made in his life and he’s an excellent dev. If I needed to, I could find 50 more like him. Sure if I was FAANG scale trying to hire 30,000 of these people it might get tough. But, I could probably create an entire training program and just apprentice people for less than they paid new grads out of 2-4 schools they normally hire from.

Or they lobby for more hackers to make more, which can happen with a change in location with an overall reduction in budget