I think you've also just well described so much of startup software development as well. Great ideas, a grand pool of undiluted computer science theory, nobody going "why do you need 120 servers to run a webpage?"
I actually untangled a mess like that (only it was some 200+ VMs on 20 fancy HP blades + SAN to serve 5000 users daily), don't even joke about it.
If you arrived with something the size of a semi-trailer to squeeze some juice people would likely ask you if you're all ok in the upper department but if you do the same in computer land they call you 'architect' and promote you. So much of that complexity is hidden and your average business owners have no clue what is required and what is overkill.
There's also a bias in which ones we read about. Nobody puts the age of a 40 year old founder in a headline.
I think PG wrote an essay on why ycombinator started out primarily accepting new graduates, but I can't find it right now. Clearly he had a different take.
It only becomes a problem when you need to stop burning money, because you can't easily reduce the hardware cost.
Do you guys actually feel that way or is the startupspeak getting to us?
If I interpret your parent post correctly, their opinion is than it's not at all reasonable to accept such low salaries.
It's just that there are apparently more than enough fools who do it anyway, until they learn that this is both unwise and unsustainable.
I know plenty of young engineers who are easily socking away 60 - 70% of their post tax income because they basically need a futon to sleep on and a macbook and don't really have many needs. After 5 years or so, they'll have half a million in the bank free and clear which is hard to do anywhere else in the country.
Now add it a spouse who works in non-profits or is a schoolteacher or any other job that's not tech. Now your expenses have risen 2x but your collective earnings has only risen 1.3x and now you're only saving 20% of your income.
Add in a kid and your expenses go up another 50% and your income rises not a jot and all of a sudden, you're in the hole and heading into debt.
Low cost/low compensation locations completely flip this equation around since there's no huge disparity in earnings and large families are less of a relative strain.
Neither is intrinsically better or worse than the other, they simply suit different lifestyles better.
I think most people would love to live in a world where that's true but it's pretty far from where we are.
> Salary shouldn't be dependent on (desired) living conditions, but on experience and value added
That's leaving out half of the equation: value added sets the upper bound for what a company can afford to pay you but they're going to negotiate down to make a profit. The seller has the same maximum cap but they're going to negotiate up and fixed costs are a key part of that – since in reality food, housing, education, etc. costs vary widely people who live somewhere like SF are going to factor that in because the alternative is moving somewhere less unbalanced.
Most places I've been realize this, but a few, hint mainly sw shops, think 5 years exp suffices. And they suffer arching in pain. It hurts to watch.
Well, sometimes you do (when it's someone else's hardware, perhaps). But often, happiness is a middle ground.
Most hardware goes through phases, often planned far in advance: The expensive first version to get something out the door, then a series of cost reductions (bring many chips into a single custom chip, ditch unused features, get new vendors for subsystems) which improve profitability.
That juicer looks like it was designed to withstand a direct hit by a bunker buster. Nobody gave a damn about profit margins or ever making it cheaper, I think they just wanted to IPO or get bought.
I've also been guilty of this in my younger days, where I was very much "C++ all the things because performance." But that's kind of my point: it's immaturity at work, here.
* no one ever got hired for under-engineering
* a lot of people have died from under-engineering
* you never notice how much was engineered juuuuust right (tm). Because it was. Just. Right.
I've bought plenty of low end products from China that I'm sure were intentionally designed as cheaply as possible with no regards to quality.
Since that's what the community generally respects and focuses on, people seek out areas to add complexity – who wants to work on a boring “solved” problem? – and, especially younger engineers, often feel they have to do things the same way Google or Facebook does (it's web-scale!) even if they have 0.001% of the engineers and 0.000001% of the traffic. It's easy to miss that most people with similar problems have so much less volume that they aren't forced to do the really cool (i.e. expensive) engineering and, since they're using something stable, it's not considered interesting enough to talk about it.