Comment by raesene9
2 years ago
Whilst competitive salaries are important, it's fair to say that, outside of the US, you can get good people for a lot less than $338k/year.
To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.
> outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK
For top-notch security developers, I call bullshit. Signal would be worthless if it started offshoring development to nickel and dime.
I said Average for a reason :D I didn't say you can get "top-notch" security developers for that.
I don't think there's industry numbers for that set of people in the UK, as it's not a big enough set. However I'd be surprised if they were 150K plus though, that's a very rare salary in the UK.
Also there are cheaper countries than the UK who have great devs.
There's definitely top-notch software and security engineers making well north of £150k in the UK. As you go up in levels, it's indeed a small set of people, but FB / Google comp for a top L7 engineer working in the same space as Signal engineers can be $700k+ in the UK. Just have a look at levels.fyi, and you'll see that even finance will pay over $500k in London. Furthermore, given how small the group of people are at the top of these companies, very few will self-report their incomes publicly, which is why you'll rarely hear about the engineers making $1M+ – but those cases do exist.
The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.