(I lived in this house) The estimate was largely driven by fear of long covid + a much higher value per hour of time, which also factored in altruistic benefits from housemate’s work that aren’t captured by the market price of their salary.
There were also about 8 of us, and we didn’t assume everyone would get it conditional on infection (household attack rates are much lower than that, and you might have time to react and quarantine). We assumed maybe like 2-3 others.
I totally expect we would have paid $84,600 to prevent a random one of us getting covid—and it would’ve even looked like a pretty cheap deal compared to getting it!
The estimate was largely driven by fear of long covid + a much higher value per hour of time
Makes sense, though FWIW I wasn’t estimating their wage at $20 an hour. Most cases are mild, and so productivity won’t likely suffer by much in most cases. I think even if the average wage there is $100 after taxes, per hour (which is pretty rich, even by Bay Area standards), my estimate is near the high end of what I’d expect the actual loss of productivity to be. Though of course I know little about who is there.
ETA: One way of estimating “altruistic benefits from housemate’s work that aren’t captured by the market price of their salary” is to ask at what after-tax wage you’d be willing to work for a completely pointless project, like painting a wall, for 2 weeks. If it’s higher than $100 an hour I commend those at Event Horizon for their devotion to altruism!
If it’s 8 hour workdays and 5 days a week, at $100/hour that’s 8 * 10 * 100 = $8k. No, you could not pay me $8k to stop working on the LW team for 2 weeks.
I’m kind of confused right now. At a mere $15k, you could probably get a pretty good software engineer to work for a month on any altruistic project you wish. I’m genuinely curious about why you think your work is so irreplaceable (and I’m not saying it isn’t!).
You could certainly hire a good software engineer at that salary, but I don’t think you could give them a vision and network and trust them to be autonomous. Money isn’t the bottleneck there. Just because you have the funding to hire someone for a role doesn’t mean you can. Hiring is incredibly difficult. Go see YC on hiring, or PG.
Most founding startup people are worth way more than their salary.
(I lived in this house) The estimate was largely driven by fear of long covid + a much higher value per hour of time, which also factored in altruistic benefits from housemate’s work that aren’t captured by the market price of their salary.
There were also about 8 of us, and we didn’t assume everyone would get it conditional on infection (household attack rates are much lower than that, and you might have time to react and quarantine). We assumed maybe like 2-3 others.
I totally expect we would have paid $84,600 to prevent a random one of us getting covid—and it would’ve even looked like a pretty cheap deal compared to getting it!
Makes sense, though FWIW I wasn’t estimating their wage at $20 an hour. Most cases are mild, and so productivity won’t likely suffer by much in most cases. I think even if the average wage there is $100 after taxes, per hour (which is pretty rich, even by Bay Area standards), my estimate is near the high end of what I’d expect the actual loss of productivity to be. Though of course I know little about who is there.
ETA: One way of estimating “altruistic benefits from housemate’s work that aren’t captured by the market price of their salary” is to ask at what after-tax wage you’d be willing to work for a completely pointless project, like painting a wall, for 2 weeks. If it’s higher than $100 an hour I commend those at Event Horizon for their devotion to altruism!
If it’s 8 hour workdays and 5 days a week, at $100/hour that’s 8 * 10 * 100 = $8k. No, you could not pay me $8k to stop working on the LW team for 2 weeks.
I think $30k-$40k might make sense.
I’m kind of confused right now. At a mere $15k, you could probably get a pretty good software engineer to work for a month on any altruistic project you wish. I’m genuinely curious about why you think your work is so irreplaceable (and I’m not saying it isn’t!).
You could certainly hire a good software engineer at that salary, but I don’t think you could give them a vision and network and trust them to be autonomous. Money isn’t the bottleneck there. Just because you have the funding to hire someone for a role doesn’t mean you can. Hiring is incredibly difficult. Go see YC on hiring, or PG.
Most founding startup people are worth way more than their salary.