Cost of business
Chris,
I might consider shifting some assumptions. While the QZ article isny entirely off, it may be leaving out signing bonuses, quarterly bonuses or other advanced compensation, and so on.
It's also likely leaving out the 20-30% outside recruiter fee per employee. All of us in Enterprise software would love to think we have the most attractive company for developers in the world, but the fact remains that it's Enterprise software. It's not the latest consumer product, or IoT, or self-drive cars, or easily repeated mobile games, or the lastest hedge or fintech platform, etc. There's a distinct lack of sexiness in Enterprise IT technologies that doesn't exactly attract armies of developers which means we need to offer higher pay, greater benefits, and so on.
At the same time it's my understanding, and this is verified on Glassdoor and other relevant sites, that at least some of Rubrick's development is done outside of their Palo Alto HQ.
That's also just the software development side of the house. The much more likely investment coming, based on Bipul's post, is in sales. This means Account Executives and Sales Engineers. And the costs for those roles are significant right now with a massive hiring burst and all the opportunity on the supply (e.g. the employee) side. Across the US at least, all of the storage startups competition with the big Goliaths for sales and technical sales talent had driven compensation up quite a bit. Not quite back to "EMC golden days" levels, but for example a top sales/SE role even in the middle of the country can command upwards of $200,000/yr OTE plus high benefits and recruiter costs. Fully loaded it's generally $250-300k by location. And that's excluding the major cities such as NYC, SF, and so on where senior/principal talent can eclipse $300k at plan.
This all comes from interviewing hundreds of sales and SE candidates around the US in storage and virtualization over the last 5 years. I can't provide deeper details, but people costs are exploding and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon.