My last company uses 1.35x salary as the fully loaded cost for engineers. Healthcare and office space costs don't scale linearly with salary, for example.
> 1.35x salary as the fully loaded cost for engineers ... Just cash (so base + bonus)
That's going to depend a lot by how the company does comp. For example, equity was ~43% of my total comp last year, which means you'd need 1.75x just for for base+bonus+stock. And that's before considering taxes, healthcare, and office space.
For both the public companies and the startups I've worked for, equity comp comes out of a pool that directly dilutes the shareholders, whereas cash comp and bonuses are both operational expenses that impact EBITDA. Depending on how cynical you are, you might think that boards and shareholders look more carefully at EBITDA performance than the option pool so managers are more inclined to care about the former than the latter.
