How we compute the total.

Salary during ramp: weekly salary x (1 - productivity at week w), summed across the ramp.
Mentor opportunity cost: peak hours per week, decaying linearly to one hour by the end of ramp, x $110 fully-loaded senior engineer rate.
Team velocity drag: 30% sprint drop x weekly value of a four-engineer surrounding team for the first four weeks.
Tooling and licences: monthly seat cost x 12 (pro-rated first year). Includes IDE, cloud dev environment, observability, SaaS tooling.
HR / IT / admin: fixed $1,500 per hire (laptop provisioning, accounts, paperwork, compliance).
Multipliers: programme maturity 0.72x to 1.25x; codebase complexity 0.85x to 1.20x; remote 1.08x.

Common questions

What numbers does the calculator pull on?+

Salary ranges from Levels.fyi 2025-26 medians, ramp curves derived from daily.dev, the GitLab handbook and TeamStation developer-ramp data, mentor hourly rates blended at $110/hr to reflect senior engineer fully-loaded cost, and programme-maturity multipliers from Brandon Hall Group's structured-onboarding research.

Why is mentor time worth so much?+

A senior engineer pulled into 14 hours of pairing per week is not just losing 14 hours - they are also context-switching out of deep work, which adds further drag on top of the logged hours. The calculator uses a blended $110/hr to keep the model conservative.

Why does codebase complexity affect cost so much?+

Tech-debt-heavy codebases extend ramp by 20-50% (BCG software productivity study). The 'complex' setting applies a 1.2x factor; 'simple' applies 0.85x. If your codebase has good tests, ADRs, and a working dev container, pick simple.

Is the remote premium real?+

Modest. Remote eliminates facilities cost but adds 8-15% in equipment shipping, cloud dev environments, and async overhead. We apply 1.08x. If you have a strong async culture and pre-boarding, you can get this back.