10k/month is inexpensive? That's a SV engineer salary. With open source software you can have extremely competent developers from anywhere in the world. Someone in Brazil for example would be thrilled to be paid US$50-100/day, or even less, to work on OSS.
Not really. As a rule of thumb, a person at a moderately lean company costs two times their salary. A person working for the government costs around three times. The rest of that money goes to overhead, benefits, and taxes.
More specifically, say that $10k a month went directly to someone working at home who files their taxes as a sole-proprietor. That income puts the high end of their income in the 28% tax bracket, but most of it is in the 25% bracket. Payroll tax (FICA) will take 15.3% off the top. State income tax varies, but I live in one that's about 5%. Then, depending where you are, there's gross receipts tax, which is about 7% where I live. Add that all together, that's 52% of that money lost. We'll round that to 50%, so now we're at $5k/month, or $60k a year. Not bad, except we don't have insurance. Health insurance premiums depend on a lot of factors, but I was seeing about $500/month or $6000/year. Then, the out of pocket max was $3000, so we need to budget that number. Note premimums are not tax deductible. That brings us down to $51k. Also, we haven't saved for retirement. Reasonable companies contribute to 401k at 10%, which would be $12k for our developer. Most people should probably put in more, but that looks fine, so now we're at $39k. Yes, there's a tax deduction for a 401k or IRA, which I ignored, but it doesn't affect these numbers by a huge amount.
Now, let's take the person working for the company at that salary level. Income tax still applies, but half the payroll tax goes to the company, so we're at 25+15.3/2+5=38% rounding up, or $74.4k. We still pay health insurance premiums, but the last place I worked had them at $100/month, that puts us at $73,200, or $70,200 if we cover our out of pocket max. Also, the company pays that portion of the retirement.
In total, $39k vs $73.2k, or almost half. That's a steal for a developer.
And, yes, this is overkill for a response, but I don't think many people realize how much money independent contractors lose to expenses and overhead. Yes, there are lifestyle perks and the potential to make more money. Most of the time, you make far, far less even though your hourly rate makes it look like you make far more.
tldr; Hiring a KiCAD developer for that amount is cheap and an amazing deal if they know what they're doing.
It's an SV engineers salary, but it's probably not an SV contractors salary. Contractors have overheads and inconsistent work, 500USD a day is reasonable.
I would also assume their contractors are fully up to speed with the project, it's not reasonable to compare them to an unknown developer in Brazil.
It is, especially for someone who doesn't work every day, and has to cover their own health insurance. If you're willing to pay someone by the month or by the year and put them on the company insurance plan, I'd imagine you'd get a better rate.
Where have you heard this? When I asked the CERN group they said they planned to hire a contractor with the donations. The CERN interns already regularly work on KiCad.
