Salary is only the starting point
Recruiting, employment load, equipment, and onboarding time belong in the same comparison.
Resource 07 · Capacity economics
Hire vs pod calculator
Compare the fully loaded first-year cost of a senior hire with an equivalent senior-led engineering pod, including recruiting and ramp-up.
Your assumptions
Compare year one, side by side.
Year-one comparisonEnter your assumptions and calculate.
Nothing is submitted or stored. The calculation runs in your browser.
Calculated comparison
Year one
- Base salary
- Recruiting
- Benefits, taxes and equipment
- Ramp-up cost at 50% productivity
- First-year cost of hire
- Equivalent pod, 12 months
The model excludes equity, severance, management time, utilization differences, and long-term context value because those vary materially by company.
How the model works
Transparent arithmetic, editable assumptions.
First-year hire cost equals salary, recruiting, loaded employment costs, and half of salary paid during ramp-up. Pod cost equals the selected monthly rate multiplied by twelve.
Ramp-up has a real cost
The model counts half of the salary paid during the months before full productivity.
Context still matters
A permanent hire builds company-owned context. A pod reduces search time and single-person dependency.
Choose the next useful step
Bring the capacity decision to a senior engineer.
We will tell you when a hire, a pod, or a smaller specialist engagement fits the roadmap better.