What a senior engineer actually costs.
The salary is the part everyone quotes, and it is a little over half the real cost of hiring a software developer. Move the sliders to your own market and the rest of it appears: employer costs, recruiting, equipment, and the months you pay for before the work arrives.
Base salary is 57% of the total. It sits between 55 and 65 percent across almost every set of assumptions, which is the single most useful thing on this page: whatever salary you are considering, the real number is that salary divided by about 0.6.
What this leaves out, deliberately: the forty to eighty hours a founder or lead spends sourcing, screening and interviewing. It is real, it lands on whoever is also responsible for revenue, and there is no honest way to put a rate on it. So it is absent here, and the number above is an underestimate rather than a sales figure.
A sprint week and an employee week are not the same thing.
The employee is yours. They hold context, they are still here next quarter, and they answer when something breaks at two in the morning. A sprint is capacity, bought and handed back. What follows is what each one costs, which is not the same question as what each one is worth.
Those multiples are large because they compare a salary in your market with engineers in ours. We are in Islamabad and we say so on the about page. The multiple is not a reason to stop hiring. It is a reason to be deliberate about which work needs someone permanent and which needs capacity you can switch off.
Two of these three say hire.
The longer version of this argument, including what we tell founders who should be hiring rather than buying sprints, is in when hiring engineers beats buying sprint capacity.