A senior engineer's salary is not the cost of that engineer. It's the cost you'll admit to in the budget meeting. The real number is 2–3× higher when you count the parts that don't show up on the offer letter.
Salary is one line. Loaded cost is the number.
Take a $175,000 salary. Add benefits, employer taxes, and health insurance, about 1.3× multiplier. That's $227,500. Add workspace, tooling, laptops, licenses, call it another $8,000/year. Now you're at $235,500 before anyone has written a line of code.
Hiring cost is a real number too.
Recruiter fees for a senior engineer average 20–25% of first-year salary, $35,000–$44,000. Even if you don't use a recruiter, your team's interviewing time is real: 4 interviews × 5 team members × 1 hour each × loaded cost of your team's time comes out around $20,000. Amortised over year 1, that's a real line item.
Opportunity cost, the honest one.
The role has been open for 90 days. During those 90 days, the roadmap was slipping. If your product was going to make an additional $50,000 in that quarter with two engineers instead of one, that missed $50,000 is the opportunity cost of the wait. It doesn't show up on the offer letter, but it's the biggest number in the calculation.
The math above is why 'we need to hire' is often the wrong first question. The right question is: 'what shape of team gets me shipping next week?'
When hiring is still the right answer
- You want the person to build institutional knowledge over years.
- The role has a strategic scope beyond execution.
- You've validated the shape of the work over 3+ months.
- You have runway to pay them while they ramp.
When it isn't
- You have a shipping crunch.
- You've been open on the role for 60+ days.
- You need multiple seats (engineer + PM + QA) to actually deliver.
- You're not sure the role should be full-time yet.
For teams in the second bucket, Yo! Teams places a senior squad in about 5 days at a rate that lines up with global engineering economics. Book a call for a scored comparison against your specific role.