In the UK, a £45k/yr employee pays their own tax and gets a take-home of £35k.
The employer pays £6k for National Insurance (atop the employee's NI contributions). Pension: 2-3k. Apprenticeship levy is £300. 3yr-amortised recruitment fee is £4000. Hardware costs: £1000. Office space £5000. Software/tools: £2500. Benefits: £1500. Training: £1000. Other admin overheads £500.
You pay that person for ~250 working-days, but they only attend for ~220, due to annual leave and sick pay, so you get around £62k worth of attendance out of that person in exchange for £70k, of which the employee sees £35k.
But that is 20% not 100%. And in most non retarded countries brutto is actually brutto, because there is no need to lie to people about how much the government takes away
Historically, this has nothing to do with lying, but is all about the founding idea of the social security system that all parties (workers, employers, state) carry part of the burden. Employers were supposed to pay their fair share because they also benefitted from the system (a sick or injured employee is not a productive one). Or saying it differently: the employer pays an insurance premium to reduce the effects of sickness. That premium is tied to the „value“ of the employee as measured by their salary.
There is plenty to improve with the system but to call it „retarded“ considering how much good it has brought to the world seems quite wrong to me. I don’t want to work in the pre-Bismarck era
In the US, over and above salary, payroll taxes add 7.65%, pension contributions might be up to 5%, and employer healthcare and other insurance contributions can be in the thousands, plus other benefits, equity compensation, and per-employee software licensing, and lots of people just estimate 2x salary as the “total cost” of an employee, although that probably overstates it a bit.
In the UK, employers pay a stealth tax of 15% (recently increased from 13.8%) on top of the quoted salary minus the first £5k (recently decreased from £9,100.)
So your "£50k" salary actually costs your employer £56,750, and that's before all the other expenses mentioned elsewhere in this thread such as hardware, office rent etc.
A quick google tells me that software devs usually count for 20% to 40% of the total workforce in a software company. The rest is overhead that increases with every added dev.
And if one were to compare cost of a dev vs cost of an LLM, the dev comes with the cost of workspace, computers, sick pay, summer party, conferences and etc etc.
I understand pension contributions, but what are the other "hidden" costs that could equal the net salary?