Do you want to know what is going on in the minds of CTOs out there regarding compensation, hiring, retention rates, the churn rates in employment? Well, you're gonna have a wonderful opportunity today to listen listen in on a conversation led by Augustine LeBron with 10 CTOs in the room and very interesting thoughts and ideas about what's going on out there right now. So have fun. From 7 CTOs, my name is Etienne Gebruin, and you're in the CTO studio. Somebody said it was a hot topic. Yeah. Darmin's a hot topic. What do we pay people? What are we supposed to be paying people? So as I said, I'm gonna start off with a warning. This might get uncomfortable because you're probably going to disagree with some of the things I'm gonna say. And, honestly, I could be wrong about some of it. I've been wrong many times before. This could easily be yet another 1. But the point here and the reason I'm doing it this way is because I wanna actually have an honest conversation instead of people saying the same things that they always say about comp. Okay? So let's talk about what I would consider the usual story about compensation, which is there's a labor market in standard microeconomic supplies. There's supply of labor, which is people looking for jobs, and a demand for labor, which is companies looking for workers. So on the supply side, obviously, the more a job pays, the more people wanna do it. And on the demand side, the cheaper you can get a worker, the more of them you'll hire, probably. And these curves intersect, and you have what's called that market clearing price. This is how it works for commodities. This is how it works for oil, lean hogs, pistachio nuts. So the question I have, is the market for, say, a senior React dev the same as the market for pistachio nuts? And the answer is, of course not. That's crazy. For 1 thing, pistachios are indifferent undifferentiated products pretty much. People definitely are not, and especially not knowledge workers. But even worse, the way that most companies think about hiring is as though they're shopping for workers, but they're not. Right? Because 1 important difference is that pistachios don't care who buys them, but people care an awful lot about who they work for. This is, like, a very big difference. K? So this is the usual story, and I'm gonna I claim that this is just a mistake. Right? And so where do these mistakes come up? I'm gonna focus the question by saying a very simple question. What's the market rate for a director of data science? So I'm just gonna throw it out there. Hey, everyone. What do you think is the market rate for a director of data science? Just shout out numbers. 2 25. Yeah. 2 20. Yeah. 2 20. Anybody else? $2,242.20 depending on the size of the company. $2.50. Cool. Anybody else? Alright. May I ask, is this people guessing, or is this what people are actually paying? Because we're not paying that. I love it. So this is an email I got from a friend of mine. He was looking for a director of data science. He wants somebody with a quant PhD, blah blah blah. He's budgeting $7.50 to $8.50 plus benefits for director, plus $1.50 to an additional $1.50 to 200 for a senior director, he has flexibility to go hire for an exemplary candidate. K? I know another company that's hiring for a director of data science right now. They're around $3.50. I know another company that is hiring a director of data science right now, and they're looking to pay $1.50. Okay? So who's making a mistake here? I'm gonna argue that nobody is making a mistake here. It's just that market rates don't exist, but I wanna get back to this. I wanna make another data point, which is that the company I used to work for, we had massive interns, intern classes. We paid our interns an annualized rate of $200,000 a year. Okay? Were we making a massive mistake? Who knows? But the the idea that a market rate exists, I think, is just 1 of these mistakes we're gonna have to get away There are few things that frustrate me more on this stuff than salary surveys because people look at those numbers and they look at them as gospel, but there's so many ways to get biased and skewed numbers on comp from those surveys. And I think, in fact, the link that Beth put this morning about comp in The Netherlands is, like, just a great example of this. There's no 1 number. And then there's this. I think I can't remember who it was actually. It said, my guy got poached for 20% more post a couple months ago. Maybe it's the thing that started this whole conversation. And, of course, the question is, are they crazy? Is this other company crazy? And, of course, the subtext, really, 5 minutes later is, am I crazy? And the point here is that maybe nobody's crazy here. The other thing about it is that when we think about market rates, it's a subtle thing about how you think about your workforce. Right? Because even though we all talk about the importance of culture in hiring and that sort of thing, if you're hyper focused on getting a good deal, then it's more like you're a vulture trying to pick off the cheapest workers you can. And so this is the 1st key insight that I think I've had about comp, which is there's no such thing as a market rate. Now at this point, somebody's gonna probably put up their hands if you're if maybe you're dying to do it right now. But what about is this something comes up again and again? It's in fact somebody mentioned it in 1 of the in the document already. What about the big boys? And the thing I hear again and again in talking to people is FAANG pays the big numbers because they're so big. And, again, I'm gonna claim that this is just wrong. These companies pay so much money for 1 simple reason. They just make a lot of money. And so if you're making a lot of money, then you should probably hire people so you can keep making more money. And as a result, you get big. So this isn't rocket science, but I think people get the arrow of causation here wrong a lot of the time. So I'm gonna claim this is our 2nd big insight here. Comp is a function of your profitability. The 3rd thing I wanna say is there's, I think, a better way to think about the process of hiring people and thinking about comp. Instead of that sort of supply and demand kind of model, I'm gonna argue that a better model is this idea of an art auction. Like, every piece of art is different, and you can't compare a Jackson Pollock to a Caravaggio. So this is the supply side of the question. Right? But there's also the fact that every art collector has different preferences. Some people love Kandinsky. Some people hate him, and this is the demand side. And finally, the other thing is that the transaction mechanism is an auction. It's not like you're going to the store. You bid, maybe you bid again, but in the end, the worker has the power to say yes or no. And so the mechanics are quite different. So I think this is our 3rd key insight. Hiring is like an art auction more than going to the store. So how does this help us? How do we actually determine comp? I'm gonna argue that this is a simplified model, but a way that I think is productive. Step 1, what is the marginal revenue that this person is going to bring into the company? If I hire this person, how much more money does this company make? This is a very hard question to answer. And in fact, I wanna spend maybe the next conversation we have on this question because I think it's, like, super, super important. So let's just take an example. Let's just say that the person's gonna bring in half $1,000,000 a year in in marginal revenue if you hire. Question 2 is, what gross margins are you targeting? Let's say you're a typical SaaS company, so maybe you're targeting 50% gross margins. Then it's a simple calculation. Right? Revenue times gross margins, that's the most you could pay this employee in order to maintain that margin. It works out to $2.50 k a year. Now, of course, you have to divide that number by all the overhead that you have. You have, like, Social Security and comp and all this stuff and and taxes and all that stuff. So let's say $1.55 a year is the headline comp number that you're gonna be giving this person. So here's this is the big question. Right? Can you get the right person for this number? And if you can't, you need to rethink your business model. And this is something that's really hard for a lot of companies and a lot of people to accept, but I think this is the core of why comp is so par. Right? You're competing against companies that are more profitable than you. You're gonna have a problem. So that's the the the provocative stuff I wanted to say, and I wanted to get it out of the way. In terms of the road ahead, like I said, maybe next conversation, we can have a really deep dive discussion on how do we determine the value of an employee to a company, like, terms of marginal revenue. And, indeed, what's that relationship between comp and value? If I pay somebody a 150 k, they get me x value. If I find somebody in that same role for 200 k, like, am I gonna get more than 33% more value? Like, these are very tough questions. This factors into this idea of the 10 xer stuff. Right? Do they exist? I claim they do. How do you find them? Do they matter? Do I need them? All these sorts of and in particular, and maybe this is something good for maybe that 3rd conversation. Again, we're gonna guide this is gonna be guided by you guys. But what comp structures make sense for which roles? How much should be bonus? How much should be stock? How much should be discretionary? Whatever. All these things. Right? Like, how do we sort this out? So that's my picture of the landscape, but my intent here is not to say this is correct or anything. I just I wanna throw ideas out there so that we can have that conversation. So let's have at it. I am I am willing to listen to all of your complaints about my claims. Thinking that the conversation around marginal value, there may be some, like, subgroups of us, like us agencies. That's a little easier for us agency folks. We know what rates we can charge in our markets. There's a little bit of intangible stuff there, of course, to to add into the equation that would be interesting to me. Yeah. That sounds right. It's probably much easier for an agency to figure out those kinds of numbers. I like the idea of knowing your budget. It's like watching those house shows, you know, you get annoyed because, like, people shop outside their budget. So I feel like maybe it's what you're putting out there is some solid advice on don't think about what you need. Think about what you can afford. I totally agree with that. I think in a I I think it gets fuzzy in a product business. It's not an agency when you're trying to forecast into the future, and you're saying, alright. We're not profitable now, but in 3 years, we're gonna be you wouldn't have this sort of margin and in a forecasting scenario. And I guess you could apply some sort of discounted cash flow to figure

Your budget. But, yeah, that that's the challenge that we we've been facing. Early stage startup like me as well, none of my employees are providing direct revenue right off the bat, but it's gonna it's investment and long term investment. So I mean, how much is this person gonna contribute over a year, 2 years? Yeah. I I love all these comments. I think that I think what I think they highlight is that maybe I'm gonna throw this out as a question. Is this the kind of stuff you think about when you think about figuring out what you need to pay somebody? And I think a lot of the time, I think people just don't. Like, what's the rate for a React dev? Okay. Can I pay that? Can I get away with less? I also am curious if folks have any experience. I roll my eyes a lot when I talk to people, and they're like, oh, man. They got really good devs. It's Facebook and Google and blah blah blah alumni. Know tons of great developers, and hardly any of them have worked at those companies. So I'm wondering if that golden ticket is worth the the price tag. And if you get someone who's been in that culture, they might not mind going back. So then you're always continuing with those rates. Right? Probably better to aim for the people who didn't make the cut or dough. My question is companies like Facebook and Google who clearly pay just massive amounts of money. How much are they working like a VC where they're investing in people hoping that by paying this person a half million or 1000000, it's gonna pay off because they're gonna develop some new great thing that's gonna make us money versus the other 8 or 9 employees who they're overpaying who really aren't contributing, but they can afford to do that. They can afford to overpay to get that 10 x or the 100 x or whatever that's gonna create the next great thing for them, and it's just an investment. When you've got cash to burn, you can take those risks. And they're good risks to take because then you're denying your competitors those employees who might be those 10 x, 100 x sort of impact. What you have said applies to a certain portion of the market, but I don't think it applies to the market the part of the market that I'm in because I specifically hire in Latin America and and outside The US. And a lot of those other companies, like the Facebooks and Googles and so forth, they don't they might not hire outside The US because they don't wanna deal with international. So I think there are some deals to be had where you can get away with hiring great people at much lower prices. If you're willing to take the people that the other companies won't take for, you know, arbitrary reasons. I was gonna say that anyway, you you are hiring from a different market in Latin America, but we do have the same situation replicated. The same that happens in The US, happens in Latin America as well. You only get access to the best talent when you can compete with what other others are are offering. I I do agree with Brand that since pandemic, many companies in The US started hiring directly, and that will generate a a super shakening situation in the in in Latin America because now, like, local companies are not able to compete with US dollars, to be honest. So it's an interesting, very specific case. But I think the same like, the slides although I'm I'm seeing I'm seeing you were trying to simplify a very complex situation. Think the same model would would apply to that in America in a sense. It's an interesting idea. This marginal value as a driver for the for salary. I think I I guess I get stuck on I don't really know how to do that very well, to be honest. We're and we're a financial services company. It was a tech enabled financial service company, so we have a platform, but we're not it's like we're not even selling the thing that we're building. We're using the thing that we're building in order to make our operation more efficient. So tying that back to a specific person and the marginal value they're adding, I would love to understand how to do that better. Yeah. And I think that's that's the thing Paul and I talk about all the time is software is 1 of those things where it's like it's like a manufacturing thing, except that you don't have great visibility into, like, your inputs and your outputs. It's not like an actual physical plant building widgets. And so that's the challenge I think we should probably try to explore in the next couple conversations. So how to get some ideas on how to do that? Yeah. It was similar. It seems to be in order to use the marginal value model, you really need to have a feedback loop where you know how accurate your estimates of marginal value were. Yeah. For sure. Eric? So I'll take a contrarian stance, Augustin, just to see if it sparks any reactions. But maybe there isn't maybe there are market rates, but maybe there isn't 1 market rate. Right? So maybe there's a market rate for a small company and a market rate for a medium company and then a market rate for a fan company. And if you are a small company, you still have to land within that market rate band to be attractive to someone who would work at probably the kind of experience they would get at a small company. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. So we tell our clients all the time, you're not competing against FANG because you can't compete with them on salaries. You have to compete on all those other things. Like, you're not a faceless drone in a large building. You get to actually work on real stuff and put your fingers in many pies and all that stuff. And yeah. Steve? Yeah. I guess I I I like the way you framed it. I I think of it a little bit differently that instead of focusing on revenue, I think there's different ways of calculating value for even just for different companies, but for different roles within a company. So you have people that are good at managing revenue, but you also have people that are good at managing risk or managing resources. And then you get people that are I mean, you get the really premium people. You get into the senior leadership where you get people that can do 2 or 3 of those things. Mhmm. And that's that drives a premium. But the way I would measure the value of somebody who like a DevOps person or somebody who's good at at QA and managing risk, the way I would value that person is very different than the way I would value somebody in business development who could drive a lot of rent. Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea. Yeah. Like Julia said, in in my thought on it was oversimplified on purpose. But, yeah, like, I think that the key insight there, Steve, that you're having is business value, whether it be revenue, risk, or whatever, is the thing that drives how much you like, what's the roof on what you can pay somebody? Brian, you had a thought? Yeah. I at 1st, when I was reading what you were putting out there about it's like an art auction, but every piece of art is different and things like that, I that resonated with me, and I really like that idea. But, unfortunately, I don't think that's really how the world works, at least not in my experience. I worked at Microsoft, and there were 1000 I worked in the Microsoft Office group, and 1000 people generated $10,000,000,000 of revenue because that's how much Office generated. There's no way that the amount of value that each individual is adding was any way correlated to how much they're being paid. So I think it to some extent, is that the companies are trying to make additional profits, and they're trying to pay their employees a wage that they think is fair and that somebody will accept. So they're trying to meet somewhere in that band of here's what I'm willing what the person's willing to accept and what they're gonna be happy or more or less happy with and what the company wants to pay. And then secondly, in terms of the 10 x there's I would definitely say that at my last company, was definitely 1 of the 10 xer people, but I wasn't making 10 times more than the other guys who were working fewer hours and not contributing as much. And in fact, I know for a fact that salespeople, and not even the top salespeople, but there were salespeople that were making substantially more money than I was. And I was working much harder, and in in my estimation, was adding a lot more value than they were. It just depends on how you how you characterize value. But I just and my boss would say, look. Salespeople get paid more because they just do. And good salespeople are really hard to find. And it's not fair, but it is what it is. So I wish the world worked some in some respects the way you're describing, and maybe it does work like that for certain people at certain companies, but that's not really matched. Gotcha. Yeah. I think when you refer to the to the Microsoft Office situation, obviously, Office is an incredible cash cow. But I think taking that big pot and dividing it by the number of employees or something is the wrong way to think about it. Like, there's a huge amount of value to Office that's just the machine that's gonna keep running even if you hired, like, terrible workers for 2 years. And so it's like that. The question is what's the marginal value? Like, you can think of it in sports terms for those of you who understand value of a replacement player. You could quantify how valuable a player is compared to who's the average person that I would replace them with? That's what we're trying to get at at at least in my mind in in kind of thinking about these things. But I totally get what you're saying, Brian, about it's hard to compare the value of a salesperson to a to a developer. That's just, like, a really hard problem. Are you familiar with Shapley values? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it sounds like in some ways, you're actually describing Shapley values and trying to determine how much if the person working alone would get paid this much and you would get paid that much, but then when you bring them together, the rate was a way of trying to compute it. But I think that it may be a different way of thinking about it is what you were just saying is how much would it cost? How much would I have to pay someone else to replace you? And I think that's that may be more aligned with how people are thinking about how much they need to pay people. What can I get to him to to accept that is of comparable skill level to do this job? I think the point there with Shapley values and cooperative games is that, look, no person is an island, especially in the kind of workplaces we have where it's all team based, and how do you put a good team together and that sort of thing. So I think it's a very good point that you're bringing up. Chris, you had a thought? 1 way to think of it might be how much is it gonna cost your company to not hire someone, right, to not have that person and not just think about their product

Activity, but the lack of productivity for the other people who are having to compensate for making up for not having that person around. And that might be it's still all guesswork. Right? It's not we're not gonna come up with an exact number in a spreadsheet, but gives you an idea of whether you can pay someone a 175,000 or 375,000 and and how much is that the business. Yeah. For sure. Edward over in South Africa, what do got for us? Yeah. I'm in Canada now. Oh, you're Canada now. Yeah. But what I've seen happening is in senior personnel that does hit that that high salary range, they just split the cost over multiple. So saying that this person is gonna contribute over multiple areas, and therefore, the cost can be split then. The problem with that is is that when you have to unlock 1 department, for example, for a month, the cost becomes astronomical. But as long as you can split the cost center, it it it starts making sense. Yeah. I was gonna say, when y'all were talking about kinda getting it back to reality, it just sounds like market rates again. So it's knowing what lane you're in. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Look. We all know that you can hire a 40th percentile person and a 60th and a 90th percentile for the same job, and they're gonna have different values in that role. It's just a question of for you, for your company, for your situation, is it worth going for the 90th percentile person? Is it worth going like, it's just a it's a business decision. Right? To me, the the tricky part is it's not just a matter of all the calculations that you said, which I agree with, but it's so it all depends on the comparison because it it's in comparison to what. Because, of course, if I could have a manager that generates, like, 300,000 in revenue and I can pay him or her 100, or if I can pay him $50 or $200. That's gonna depend on how they compare to the market and how much the market is paying them so I don't lose them in the future or even if that I can hire them in the 1st place. So what I'm really having a hard time figuring out is where to get proper information. And then how do we know if what we pay is competitive or not, or do we wait until that person beams to reunite that was not enough? Yeah. So just a couple of thoughts that I have just based on my experience in working some of our clients is 1 of the things you can do well if you're very self aware is decide what percentile person am I looking for. There's a for every position, there's a distribution of both salaries and of of of abilities of people. And so maybe for some roles, look, you don't need that that really good person. Like, some roles look. Let's face it. Like, a lot of software development, blue collar work. Right? But let's face it. And so maybe you don't need that 90th percentile person in that role. Can we create management structures that that sort of get really good work out of people who who can't get a job or can't get salaries higher than the ones you're paying. That's that's the trade off we do as engineering managers a lot of the time. And so understanding is what percentile person do I need in this role? 1 of the fail failure modes that we see a lot is people say, okay. I want, like, 60th or 65th percentile people in every role, where probably the optimal thing is to have 1 or 2 or 3, like, 80th percentile people and a bunch of 40th percentile people. That's probably a better trade off a lot of the time. And at a macro level, that's a lot of what sort of offshoring and nearshoring it. That's what we do. Like, when you said the blue collar thing, I was giggling because that's part of my pitch. Like, when we're talking to people, I tell them, like, this stuff is not rocket science. You're moving data from here to there. We can train people in a month to do the, like, the 20% that does 80% of the work you need done, and then we have these 4 show pony people for the rest of it. Yeah. I don't know if there's direct correlation, though, between the best people and the highest salary. There's it's not that direct. There's a correlation, but it's Yeah. Not And interestingly, like, on the other side of the of this thing, people don't know how much they are worth as well. They're also trying to figure out how much should I be paid. Am I okay accepting this job? So it's it's conflict for I'm I know I'm not adding any answers, just more questions perhaps. But I don't know how many of you have read Reed Hastings book, No Rules, popular book, came out recently. But there is a part in there, and I understand this is Netflix, so Netflix, of course, is a big gorilla. But 1 of the things that they do at Netflix, which I thought was interesting food for thought, is they actually encourage all employees to know what they're worth. It's the opposite of what most companies do. 1 of the things that Reid puts in the book is he says, look, if you're an employee at Netflix, your job is to figure out what you're worth. And if you get a call from a recruiter, we actually want you to not hang up, which is interesting. Take the call, find out what the recruiter's willing to pay you, but please, as a courtesy, give us the 1st right of refusal to match the offer. So they've created this culture where people are responsible for figuring out their own worth. It's counterintuitive because you think, well, I would just encourage people to leave. But in fact, that's not quite what happens because people like the fact that they're being encouraged by their management to know their worth. Listening to this conversation, it's 1 of the exercises we've gone through. Obviously, come through the end of the year is trying to make sure everybody it's not just about hiring. It's about the people that work for you right now, and are they being paid, you know, correctly? And, I mean, we we have developers, especially our initial developers, that 1 of them left for twice his salary. How do you go compete with that when you're trying to create kind of an equitable pay scale among people that are in your workforce? And I I think it's it's struck me over the last year or 2 that it isn't just what are the pay levels, it's that standard deviation about the range of what people are willing, what companies are willing to offer for, like we've been saying, pretty much commodity roles has just been all over the place, and there really is no normally Yeah. Certainly, you you definitely see it in companies where, okay, we've got this contract and, you know, this has to get done, like, in 2 months, come hell or high water. And, yeah, I mean, you're just gonna pay whatever it is you need to do to to get this whatever $10,000,000 contract done. And so at that point, that's a weird temporary situation, but sometimes that can get normalized too. So Mhmm. It's not ideal. We're we're we're in a situation right now where if somebody wants to leave, even if 1 of your best people wants to leave to find more money, they'll be able to all likelihood. And so that's 1 of the things we realize is all of the things other than money that figure into this equation of why people would wanna work with you and for you has become so monumentally important is because those are the things that are gonna make people decide to to make a decision contrary to their financial Of course. It might not even be contrary. Right? Taking a job at a new company that you don't know is a risk, and there's a cost associated with that risk. Oh, it sounds pretty good, but it turns out it wasn't so great. Like, people generally don't wanna leave their jobs. It's comfortable making changes scary and hard. And so, like, most people probably just wanna stay somewhere they're happy. And if they feel like they're getting paid reasonably fairly, that's probably good enough for most people. Yeah. I'm wondering if this idea of handling it like an art auction and Anthony Stevens mentioned, aren't we creating an extremely toxic hiring environment? We can't pay the salaries. People are not worthy salaries. Young people coming up, they know that the golden ticket is getting into 1 of these bigger companies. They learn all of the requirements to do it. They survive only to be there. And then after their stocks are vested, they're happy to take whatever job because they've made it, but now they've got this unrealistic expectation about their skills, which just doesn't add up. Yep. That's definitely a phenomenon. There's no shortage of online courses that you can do to learn how to crack the Google interview. It's like how many dynamic programming problems do you have to do to, like, finally get a job at Google or something. I don't know. James, I think, brought up a really interesting point from a cultural perspective, which is that that younger people seem to be more willing to discuss comp with their peers, and it used to be taboo, and it's not really not anymore. But I think the thing that he points out, and this gets back to what you were saying, Steve, is if you have certain roles and you fit if you have pay bands for those roles and you systematically move people outside of those pay bands, then you're just creating this fundamental instability in your company's culture that's gonna bite you eventually. Ryan, you had a thought? Suppose that when people interview for a job, there's an interview process. There's a screening process. It's not it's not like we literally have developers standing in front of the room. We haven't gotten there yet, But, like, maybe someone can go and start that. We'll call it developer auctions, and we'll just have 50 companies sitting there in front of them simultaneously and literally bidding on them in real time. Or we could even do a silent auction. But that's we're not there yet, fortunately. But my thing, it just I don't think that really describes how it works because you have to apply to a job. You have to meet with a recruiter. There's weeks that pass between opportunities. A lot of times when you get an offer, the offer's exploding, and you have a week to decide. It's not like, typically, you get more than just a couple offers. We all don't have the bandwidth to apply to a 100 companies, get a 100 offers all within a week and make a decision that way. So that's why I don't think it's exactly it's not quite, like, an art auction. Sure. I I agree. The mechanics definitely there's a lot of mechanics there that are different. I mean, my point is saying, and not to necessarily defend the analogy, but my point is saying it is, like, it's definitely not like going to the store. And I think that's what I was trying to make. Yeah. I think I have a question for the group. We're a pretty small company. And in terms of, like, US pay rates would be in in that small company band, we can't compete with FANG and so on.

Something that's unique for us is that we we pay without respect to low location. So some of our European developers, they get the exact same rate that we would pay if they were in The US, which locally to them is FANG level compensation. So my question is, do you think now that with everything that's changing and how remote work is becoming normalized, do you think this is are we in the leading phase of something that's coming, or is you do think this is going away and that we'll still have very much location specific pay even as people can move around? I raised that exact point on the Slack yesterday. Yeah. This is you're gonna get some strong opinions here, Eric. I'm warning you. Bring it. My opinion is it's gonna flatten out, and people are gonna be I think a lot of the devs now are getting out of school and getting a $150, and they don't realize, like, 5 years, they're gonna have a hard time finding a job because they just got a cushy job and hadn't really done anything, taking long lunches and all that. And then it globalizes, and I think it'll be like, 2,000 all over again. That's just my guess. At least that's what keeps me, like, not doing that. I tell doves all the time that we're coal miners. Enjoy it while it lasts because it it won't I I think the the blue collar comment is exactly right, that at some point, there's a supply of devs starts meeting demand, and it it stops escalating in a crazy way for most people. Not all, but for most. Yeah. And it's just not that hard. It'd be if you're a guy waiting tables and you're like, I can spend a year and learn how to program and be making a $100,000, how many people are gonna sit around and wait tables and not learn how to program? It's just not that hard. Yeah. I mean I think I I think Tracy puts it just really quickly, I think Tracy makes a really good point here. I I looked up Bureau of Labor Statistics information. There are more computer programmers in The United States than auto workers as of a few years ago, so we're there. I throw out that I think though I think eventually it's going to flatten out, I think with the move of the FANG companies towards more remote work, it's probably going to get worse before it gets better as they're they're opening up remote work, and they're still paying the same rates. I know specifically in in Birmingham, Alabama, we had shipped that started there and then moved to San Francisco, then came back to Birmingham and was paying the 200,000 plus for senior developers, which was twice as much as any other company was paying there. They're able to just eat up the whole market. So in the short term, I expect it's just gonna continue to inflate at the the crazy rates that we're seeing. Yeah. I'm with the David there. But on the question on if we should pay based on location or not, we my company, we do nearshoring. So we have I'm from Buenos Aires, Argentina. We have people all over Latin America. When we started the company 5 years ago, we asked ourselves, are we paying people based on how much the project pays, which all of our clients are in The US, or are we paying people based on their locations? Because it's not the same even in Latin America, it's not the same to live in Mexico where with $5,000, you are just, like, living decently, but you are not, like, the king of the world. We're in Argentina, for example. That's a lot of money. We went back and forth a lot, and we ended up deciding to there's no fair answer from what we identified. There's no way of being fair towards everyone. Even if we pay people a differentiated rate rate based on location, it's not gonna be fair based on what clients pay. And if we do it the other way around, there's always someone that is not winning. We ended up paying everyone the same, and we expected people to start moving to locations where the cost of living was cheaper, and that never happened, moving to Europe, which is even more expensive. So I think there's no correct answer or way of anticipate, at least from what I've seen, way of anticipating what the behavior will be. But, Eric, if you find a formula there be sharing because we are always wondering about the same. Yeah. Eric's head of HR wrote a very long, very thoughtful blog post about location based pay. I strongly suggest I don't know if Eric, you wanna throw it on the chat there, but I I it's probably the best thing I've read about it because it under it it understands exactly what you just said, Julia. It's like, any argument you can make about x, like, you will be able to make a very sensible sounding argument about the opposite. And so probably the answer isn't so simple. And, Paul, you had a thought? I'm just gonna say real quick. Yeah. Good thoughts on that. Just to picking up on what Ryan was saying, I I think a useful piece of guidance is to think of your I think what's happening is sellers are moving to more bimodal distributions where you have the people that are responsible for your core IP, like your core edge. You wanna pay them a lot. Then the work that you do in your company that isn't, let's say, existential or core IP, or it's just like Ryan's saying, the the blue collar work of getting this the stuff out the door, you need to think about how you save money there. And I think a dangerous place to be is in the middle of the bell curve. And that seems to be what's going away now is we're going from fat curve to something that looks more like 2 2 peaks. And so maybe that's a good way to think about how you spend your salaries. Yeah. My question, maybe this is better served for for next week topic or something, but like, how is everyone budgeting for this? And there's just such a huge variance. And and we know that, like, the like an art auction, you may want a Picasso, but it may take you 10 years before you can actually bid on that Picasso, right, before you have the ability. So how do you budget for knowing that you want this, but knowing that it could take you a year? And then during that time, other other things may come along that other people may come along and you're like, this person could be really useful. I'm I'm not planning for this person until, you know, 9 months out or until I fill this other role, but do we let them go because I need to fill this other role 1st? And then do you shift budget to try and go grab the the person that you you know, to outbid them from your competitors? It seems like that's the tricky part is how do you deal with this magic budgeting thing? You've got a plan for this. You can't just, we don't have unlimited funds and just say, I found the person, and so let's throw whatever we can at them. Yeah. This is in in game theory known as the secretary problem. Right? Like, how can I get the best person, but I have to make a sequential decision at every point? And the answer for everybody who's who's a nerd is 1 over e people. That's the fraction you should interview and then hire. But, like, it's a similar sort of thing. Right? There's a cost to to to not doing something. There's a cost of doing something suboptimal, like, how do we balance that? I think it's probably worth diving into next in the next conversation for sure. Chris, I was gonna say, do you know what your budget is or is it budget just unlimited? Yeah. So right now I'm I'm getting ready to raise money. So I'm trying to budget for how much money I'm gonna raise and it's Yeah. That that's tough. Ideally, I raise more money than I need, but that's not a great idea either. No. It's it's finding that magic, you know, balance between Yeah. There's so much inflation right now. It seems hard to tell. Yeah. I I think that might be useful, Chris. I don't know. We could probably find another maybe 2 or 3 or 4 people in 7 CTOs in that same situation you're in, and maybe we can figure out a way to create a little working group where you just you all work on each other's stuff together to hash out some of these questions because I think doing it alone is awful. Right? Yeah. It's tough. I was just telling Julia, you're it's guesswork, but it's tough when you're the only person guessing. Like, you have no idea how close or or far off. Like, what might be my reality someone else might look at and go, woah. That's crazy. Yeah. So Yeah. I mean, over the last few years, have the market rate changed significantly? It's super volatile right now. So you're planning right now for the next 6 months, a year, and it's gonna change in a year. Yeah. Yeah. As somebody in a similar situation would definitely be interested in some sort of a a working group there. We've seen that in the past year since we fundraise budgeting, whatever, a 120 k for a certain role. It's like, actually gonna be a 150 or a 180, and we didn't know that when we raised money. So how do we go and report that back to investors and all those things as well? So, yeah, volatility is is definitely the buzzword. We definitely have a plan b and maybe a c. Yeah. The other thing getting back to 1 thing that Brian said that really resonates with me is I don't know if you guys see it on LinkedIn. I see it on LinkedIn all the time where a recruiter will say, hey. I need somebody with 5 years of experience in, like, NetSuite or, you know, some niche technology where almost definitely there's no more than a 100 people out there doing that thing, and you're not gonna get in touch with them. Like, almost definitely the thing you should be biasing towards is finding somebody smart and figuring out a way to train them in the specific niche technology that you have. You can probably just pay them less at 1st, get them up to speed. You give them a big pay bump in year 2. They're super happy. Now they're super engaged with your company. They're like, they feel like your company is like a training and growth. There's lots of ways to skin this cat if we get out of the little box that that recruiters in particular wanna put us in. I talked to a lot of recruiters, and they, like, they have 1 way of looking at the world. And, and I feel like especially for smaller companies, it's probably not optimal.