You know not what you speak of. I am small developer without funding.
For every developer I hire I pay tax on 90% of their wages in year 1.
So, if I hire a 200k a year developer, I have an increased tax liability of 180k. That works out to paying about $75k ~ $85k. So my 200k developer becomes an 285k developer.
Now, eventually I could regain that cost, or I could do like I know of a few companies and commit tax fraud by not correctly reporting my expenses.
BTW even as a partner I am hit by this - to correctly file my taxes I have to report my retirement savings as development revenue and pay tax on what is supposed to be tax free.
Pretty cool.