But yeah, double is insane. When I saw prices for COBRA from Facebook, it was $3300 a month, and that was god-tier insurance - the insurance benefits were so good they had a custom list of what was covered that was probably way better than anything available on the market (e.g. you want brand name drugs? no problem. You don't want to try both ambien and trazadone before taking a sleep medication doctors actually recommend? No problem - etc.) - but for my needs it was barely better than COBRA costing way less than half. $3300/mo, or even $1200/mo for an entry level ops worker is a lot of their salary, and probably where the double comes from. At SWE compensation most of it ceases to scale.
The fully loaded costs including proportional management costs isn't relevant to the true marginal engineer, but estimates I've gotten from higher-ups definitely factor into engineering decisions about "should we spend engineering time to save money/make more money - how much will doing this thing cost the company" (opportunity costs are also relevant, but usually less grounded, since most projects don't have concrete benefits like "we will save $x/yr in infra costs")
It's kind of like neuroscientists found the trigger to tell your brain "we're going to do a clean shutdown now, trigger transition to runlevel 0".
Quiviviq, Dayvigo, Belsomra. All still on-patent, so they don't have generics and are pretty expensive (like $1000/mo if your insurance doesn't cover them). A lot of doctors won't recommend them in practice because most of their patients won't yet be able to get them covered.
Ask your doctor about them, look them up in your insurance's formulary to see what's required (e.g. if you have tried both Ambien and Trazadone and can document it), and see what they can do, before writing it off!
The expectation is Belsomra will lose its patent in 2029 and then generic makers can try to get one approved - so it's not that far off!
My experience was not with pure software houses; we had some labs, measurement and RF equipment, but even without the hardware component the offices, insurance, admin expenses, HR, janitors, conference travel and so on would easily bump the total employee cost to double the salary. My 2c.
For a traditional software engineer? I retired last year after 3 decades and my salary was about the same as it was in the early 2000's at the last company I was at. Maybe I should have negotiated more but I thought only FAANG paid traditional pre-AI engineers more than $250K.
If 250k was the total comp (taking into account bonus/stocks/what have you) then yeah, you definitely should have negotiated.
If one uses AI minimally and is able to out perform peers who are maxing out AI spend, one might want to use that in salary negotiations.
This is not a good bellwether for the AI industry, including its adherents. Their growth assumed a level of indispensability that’s not being reflected in hard numbers and real costs, which lends credence to the notion that these IPOs being fast-tracked are meant to try and cash out before the bubble really pops in earnest. There’s no way consuming enterprises are going to pay such insane costs for such minimal uplift in the long run, and the AI companies can’t keep offering subsidized tokens via subscription plans at their current pricing.