"Basecamp pays at the top 10% for our industry at San Francisco salary levels, regardless of where an employee lives. The comparison data is provided by a company called Radford that polls compensation data from all the major companies in our industry and plenty of our smaller peers as well. Because we don't pay bonuses, we match our base compensation to the base + bonus of our peer group."
They actually had people buying external hard drives for them last year[1], so they're probably just removing the drives from the housings and then recycling the casing.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We make the decision to switch to the more dense drives when the "break even" point is about 1 year of operation. We have a little spread sheet (it isn't rocket science) of how much electricity a drive uses, what we are paying for the physical space rental, etc. We plug in the prices if the 4 TB drives pay for the overhead within 1 year we go ahead and buy those.
The drives seem to last about 5 years in our experience, so technically we should be able to buy the more dense drive it it pays back in 4 years, but cash to run the business is very dear to our hearts so we don't like going out much more than a year on a payback.
My local Costco has them at $139/ea for the 4TB externals right now. I wonder if they have some sort of dynamic/regional pricing that causes the price to go up in the Bay Area.
And I wonder if that happened automatically in their yield-management software, perhaps triggered by sales data showing that Bay Area stored got completely cleaned out on a regular basis? :-)
"Basecamp pays at the top 10% for our industry at San Francisco salary levels, regardless of where an employee lives. The comparison data is provided by a company called Radford that polls compensation data from all the major companies in our industry and plenty of our smaller peers as well. Because we don't pay bonuses, we match our base compensation to the base + bonus of our peer group."
[1]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-ca...