Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

So why is it then that 23 year old engineers are building everything in SV? It certainly explains a lot about what I see happening there.

They have less to loose (already broke), are not accustomed to nice things (never experienced a real salary), and are enthralled by startup culture (so they'll accept shit equity and work all night).

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.

Hiring ten 23 year olds and paying for 20 servers is cheaper than hiring five 40 year olds and paying for 3 servers.

It only becomes a problem when you need to stop burning money, because you can't easily reduce the hardware cost.

Also have to take into account that hardware is ridiculously cheap nowadays. You can rent quite a lot of raw computing power with the salary of one engineer.

Not to mention one engineer can spin up and operate a big horizontally scaling cluster.

23yo engineers are often also willing to bunk up with three friends in a two bedroom apartment, which makes living in SF/SV more feasible. Once you have a family (generally, older engineers) you generally dont want to be sharing an apartment, so your minimum salary requirements go up.

I love how everyone always words this like it's perfectly reasonable to expact a salary that has you living like a college student and unreasonable to ask for a salary that lets you live like an actual grownup who worked hard and took some risks to get expertise.

Do you guys actually feel that way or is the startupspeak getting to us?

> I love how everyone always words this like it's perfectly reasonable to expact a salary that has you living like a college student and unreasonable to ask for a salary that lets you live like an actual grownup

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.

This is exactly what the parent poster (me) was suggesting!

It just comes down to the math of living in a high cost/high compensation area. Your standard of living is highly dependant on the ratio of high economic productivity earners in your unit.

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.

Salary shouldn't be dependent on (desired) living conditions, but on experience and value added. Likewise, living conditions shouldn't depend on salary - as in, you should be able to afford a decent apartment on minimum income anywhere in the country.

> you should be able to afford a decent apartment on minimum income anywhere in the country.

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.

Except in Juicero's case, the cause wasn't 23 year old engineers, but outsourcing to celebrity designers and engineering firms.

Because most of the time hardware is cheap and building it quickly but inefficiently is better for the business than hand-aligning your opcodes to use the fastest part of the drum memory.

The great sadness to me is that incentives in architecture almost encourage this... Hardware is cheap and good designers are few. So when guys like you can come in and squash down the complexity,, company thinks it won twice (first time for delivery.. Wow look how fast it is!; second time for efficiency)

I strongly suspect there was more at play there (huge kickback to one of the people ordering the hardware). And no, the customer didn't think they won twice, the first time almost killed them. For all those goodies it still did not perform. You really wonder how they managed to burn all those cycles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com