Jay Honeck wrote:

On top of that, $500K over 3 years equates to approximately the cost of 1
full time professional (as in highly skilled) employee with all benefits
and
overhead thrown in.

This seems hugely over-blown. I'd be interested in how you arrived at that?

The actual cost of any employee is their salary/wages plus (benefits if any)
plus a share of the overheads that are required to keep that employee, (eg
offices/buildings, support-staff, utilities, etc, etc, etc)

Depending upon the industry, the real cost of an employee to an organisation
is somewhere between 2 and 4 times what the employee is paid.