Discussion

Archelaos: > In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per yearWhy not outsource this to a cheaper country? For example, here in Germany salaries are about half of that, and the talent pool is excellent.

ExpertAdvisor01: Add 30% on top of your salary to cover social contributions+ healthcare.

mhitza: Never heard of them, and this page doesn't tell me what they do, but I've laughed at this line> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per yearNot really, there's basically a single sub-market in the US market where that is the norm.

tadhglewis: Interestingly I applied for one of their senior frontend positions that required a "high level of experience" in Australia, they said 120k AUD with no room to go higher. Went with an offer of 170k instead.

ramon156: Id do it for 1/3rd!

rvz: Claude (or any other chatbot) can do it for 1/100th of the cost and faster than anyone.So $150k+ is overpriced.

oofbey: I like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.

0xy: Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.

alance: Source?

833: Not sure why it's always a binary: either give us $1M or we shut down.Vast majority of products and services can continue on or near zero, with slow or zero velocity.Really, you can't fire half the team if you have to and keep operating?1.75M MAU requires very small infrastructure.

johnisgood: Yeah, there is no way they need $1M for the servers, come on...

kilroy123: That salary is not unheard of at all in London. Especially when you convert £ to $.

esskay: Sure but Londons known for being high wages. Now change that location to Cornwall or the North of England and watch it get almost cut in half.

walthamstow: Sad. I will need a new way to communicate with my guy.

cl3misch: Afaik Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?The gross income to the employee might be 75k in Germany, but the cost to the employer is roughly twice that amount in turn.In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.

ExpertAdvisor01: They are based in Switzerland . 140k USD median dev salary

xmattx: For a Senior perhaps. The figures I find for Switzerland are more in the 90-120 range depending on the source. Also, I think what OP was referring to is the 'most markets' bit. Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).

TeMPOraL: > Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).How does that look when you correct for costs of living, because I imagine that would put London at the bottom of the list, as one of those places where senior-level tech salary is not enough to afford living in the city itself (and I don't mean the City of London, but the rest of it too).

thefounder: >> Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage.Yeah if you compare that with Facebook messenger and other such services but if you want secure communication it's not reasonable.

AugieDB: For a senior developer, $150,000 is about right. I'm looking at the latest half dozen jobs I've seen on LinkedIn for open senior developer positions and they all start at that number, and range up to $185k to $200k. Digging a little deeper, I see some th atstart well above that number, but it's for the huge companies you're thinking of -- Google, Netflix, Github.

esskay: Time to broaden their hiring pool then, $150k is double the cost of a senior developer in many other parts of the world (yes including English speaking first world countries).When you've got 90 days till the doors close you cant be picky about your hiring pool.

mhitza: The claim is that 150k is the baseline that is often exceeded. I don't know the region you're looking for on LinkedIn, but what I see for European jobs is that they barely crack 100k for developers. At least the senior, non highly specialist, jobs I'm seeing.

rvz: > In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year, and on top of this there are legal and operational overheads for running the STF.Translation:Our product makes no money, has no use case and we need $1M to survive.Two ways a PE "cost saver" would fix this:1. Claude + 1x senior engineer (in India).2. CTO + Claude and no senior engineers / employees.Given we have (allegedly) achieved "AGI" (heavily disputed) they don't need as many employees.Especially those that are after $150k+ which when you can vibe code with Claude for less than $10k anyway. /sJob done.

mcherm: So you are suggesting that a private communications and messaging system that proports to offer reliable anonymity is a reasonable use case for more-or-less unsupervised development by Claude? Because that is just the sort of use case where I would NOT trust an unsupervised AI.

zipy124: not unheard of, but not typical.

balamatom: >Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usageIn many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.

oofbey: I guess it depends on what you consider normal. Most of the humans I know find it vastly easier to produce a state issued id to an authority than to generate a public/private key pair.

balamatom: What's easier: to obtain state ID, or to sign up to a website with your preferred username and password?

oofbey: Obtaining your first id is obviously difficult. But so is obtaining your first computer. If you’re on good terms with your government, obtaining the id is easier. That’s really the key. Sure if you focus on hostile states this stuff all makes sense. If you’re insistent on hiding from authorities then many things become much more difficult, by design.

bsaul: signal is really crappy. It fails at the most basic feature which is : deliver the message on time.

bjord: does it? have you been trying to use signal while disconnected from the internet?

oofbey: I had a friend who complained about this too. I never understood it. She had a really cheap old android phone. Maybe that’s the issue?

bjord: I primarily use a nearly-bottom end android phone that's a few years old and just recently switched to an even older, even lower end android phone that is six years old. Neither has that issue.Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.

racuna: A few months ago, a Session update logged me out. I tried to log back in, but my passphrase caused Session to crash. I tried the Play Store version, the F-Droid version, and the desktop version.Support told me that login method had been around for a while, and I didn’t know it. So suddenly, I was locked out and couldn’t access MY ACCOUNT. I used to promote Session, but since their support response was basically a big “fuck you,” I say “fuck you too,” and I hope people switch to SimpleX.

RandomGerm4n: That’s not really a big deal since the session encryption was insecure anyway. It feels almost like a honeypot after they've removed forward secrecy. If you’re looking for a decentralized alternative SimpleX Chat is a more secure option.

miroljub: God forbid someone get paid for their work.