# What four thousand monthly salaries actually mean > I am not an inventor. I am not building something the world has never seen. I run a services firm, and the way I think about its impact is through the salaries it has paid out, one month at a time, for sixteen years. Source: https://waqaspitafi.com/writings/4000-kitchens/ --- Published July 6, 2026 Reading 3 min Pillar Building durably Share [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwaqaspitafi.com%2Fwritings%2F4000-kitchens%2F) [X](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwaqaspitafi.com%2Fwritings%2F4000-kitchens%2F&text=What%20four%20thousand%20monthly%20salaries%20actually%20mean) [Essay](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings) # What four thousand monthly salaries actually mean I am not an inventor. I am not building something the world has never seen. I run a services firm, and the way I think about its impact is through the salaries it has paid out, one month at a time, for sixteen years. I am not an innovator. I am not an inventor. I do not have a product that the world has never seen. I run an engineering services firm, and most of the work the firm does is owned, by contract, by the client. The question I have asked myself for years is what the impact of a company like this actually is, on the world it is operating in. I worked the math out the first time around 2017. By that point DevBatch had been running for seven years. We had paid roughly four thousand monthly salaries across the company’s history. I sat down and translated the four thousand salaries into something I could feel. Four thousand monthly salaries paid is roughly four thousand kitchens that ran on time that month. Pakistani households are usually three to four people, sometimes more. Four thousand kitchens means around twelve thousand people who ate that month because of the work the firm was doing. Twelve thousand families that could promise their children school the next year. Twelve thousand reasons that healthcare was reachable when somebody got sick. I am writing it down again now in 2026 because the number has grown. I will not give the precise current count, partly because I do not run the company by the count, and partly because precise counts are misleading in a year-by-year frame. What I will say is that the trend has continued. Most months the company has paid more salaries than the month before. Most years the company has employed more engineers than the year before. The compounding has been quiet but real. This is the kind of impact that does not appear on a venture-capital scoreboard. There is no exit. There is no IPO. There is no headline. The metric is the steady transfer of capital from the United States and the Gulf into Pakistani households, month after month, year after year, by way of an engineering services firm that happens to sit between them. I think about this when people ask me what DevBatch’s mission is. The mission is, on paper, what the marketing material says: senior engineering teams on demand, healthcare-enterprise platforms, AI services. The mission is, in practice, that for sixteen years a steady current of monthly payroll has run through this company into the lives of people I will never meet. There is a religious framing for this in my tradition that I want to put down without dressing it up. The framing is that we do not hire people, they hire themselves to our business, because Allah makes our business the way through which they earn their livelihoods. In the process, He keeps our business going. The relationship runs both ways. We are not the source of the salary. We are the channel. If you take the religious framing out, the secular version is the same. A services business is a redistribution mechanism. Capital comes in from clients. Capital goes out to engineers. The firm itself is the medium. The firm survives only as long as it is honestly performing the channel function. This is why I have been suspicious, for sixteen years, of the moves that would have made DevBatch grow faster at the cost of the channel. Outside investment that would have changed who the company answered to. Aggressive M&A that would have collapsed the relationship with the engineers. A pivot toward selling our own products that would have detached the firm from the underlying redistribution. The slower path, run as a closely held Texas LLC by a single owner with a long view, has produced the kind of compounding that does not show up on a chart. It shows up in the count of kitchens that ran on time this month. If you are running a services business and you are wondering whether the work matters, the framing is right there. Stop counting your customers for a moment. Count your salaries. They are the closest thing to truth your company will produce. #building#pakistan#devbatch#durability Waqas Khan Pitafi Founder and CEO of DevBatch since 2010. Sixteen years building one engineering services firm, from Pakistan, now in Dallas. [Follow on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pitaficodes) Next step ## If this was worth your time, there is more of it I read every message that comes through the form. Specific asks get faster replies than open-ended ones. [Start a conversation](https://waqaspitafi.com/connect) [Read more writing](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings) Keep reading 1. [ June 22, 2026 · 3 min ## The uneducated engineer Three buckets of education, and the one we have stopped filling. Why I think the modern engineering profession is graduating brilliant people who are still uneducated. ](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings/uneducated-engineer) 2. 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