
Why your indie budget calculations are massively, stupidly WRONG on every level - doppp
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2016/12/12/why-your-indie-budget-calculations-are-massively-stupidly-wrong-on-every-level/
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trome
Damn, your post came across as extremely crunchy. I get that you think all of
us on the west coast of the US are expecting $XXXk a year, but that both is
and isn't the case depending on where & what you do. For example, in Seattle
F5 Networks will pitch a fresh out of college grad somewhere around $85k a
year, whereas most other firms will pitch them $10k higher minimum.

That being said, you have groups like Uwajimaya who pay their IT people on the
order of $40k, and expect them to have comparable skills to what the
aforementioned companies expect.

Not saying that it isn't unreasonable to tell indie devs they should bundle
the incidental costs (cabling, office supplies, etc) and plan for non-
consumable items to outlive the current project, but its just a matter of how
you present those costs ultimately if you are pitching your first project.

Onto international developers, yes, you definitely shouldn't limit yourself to
high cost US based locations if you can avoid that limiting factor, but many
managers & organizations are just not up to handling remote working, hence why
Google, Adobe, Aliyun, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are all actively sucking up
every bit of talent they can hire in this market right now.

They need these employees stateside and ASAP, either due to legal/compliance
requirements or due to their own organizational reasons. If you don't want to
compete against them, there are great Russian devs you can hire for $12k a
year, while also having much better local & international connectivity than
many other locations (Manila, anywhere in India, China, etc).

I would not try to touch most of those locations having dealt with
connectivity issues in the past, just not worth the hassle to save a few grand
a year, only to deal with PLDT providing substandard connectivity that is
forced to have a 300ms penalty tacked onto it for transport outside their
network.

