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The costs to hire management and "support staff" like TPMs that scale with SWEs that help them meet goals is proportional to SWEs - often that is taken for the higher end fully loaded costs, depending on how you define it. Office space in downtown SF, Mountain View, or Palo Alto costs more than office space for back office workers in Nashville or Utah. Firms that hire SWEs often have fringe benefits like free food etc. and while they may apply to all workers, it tends to go along with hiring lots of SWEs.

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")

by dalyons17 hours ago|

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Wait what are the sleep medications they actually recommend?

by jmalicki17 hours ago|

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DORAs. Rather than being sedatives, they directly target receptors in your brain that make you think you should sleep. I think the oldest one came out in like 2011.

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.

by dalyons16 hours ago|

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Genuinely thank you. I’ve had sleep issues my whole life and no one has mentioned these. Not saying I will pay that, but more info is always good.

by jmalicki16 hours ago|

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GoodRX is always worth checking out, a ton of manufacturers will have coupons if you have insurance but they won't cover it.

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!

by ptero18 hours ago|

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While the fully burdened cost of an engineer being double his salary sounds suspicious, this is indeed broadly the case. It has been (sometimes significantly) more than double in the case in every US employer where I worked and where I saw both numbers. In one case it was a hair under 3x.

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.