VirusNewbie

>One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success

So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.

Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).

So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?

>Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.

Anthropic has been very strategic about playing all the big cloud providers off each other. They're also in desperate need of inference, and I don't think AWS has the capacity to scale up as fast as they want. AWS may also be trying to 'force' them to use Graviton, and I don't think Anthropic is as big of a fan.

~1600 TPS is not 'high scale'.

It's optionality that only has an upside financially, while the downside is just having to do more interviews.

Let's say you're worth 300k on the open market as a senior software engineer. If you get a job that pays 200k a year + 400k in stock over four years, you're making ~300k.

Except if after the first year, the stock goes up 30%, you're making 330k the second year + whatever cash raise you get. Then if it goes up another 10%, and so on... etc.

If, however the stock falls after the first year, presumably you can go out and find another 300k a year job at a different company.

Because I get way more money.

This is why it's important to get paid in stock. I get an automatic extra 100k a year if inflation runs hot!

for existing, well established renters, sure. For new renters, or people who move, or people who face housing insecurity, or people who want to buy homes, it's much higher and not accurately reflected in CPI.

Housing has a massive lag when it comes to CPI.

CPI works by asking how much people pay for rent. If home prices raise 20% in one year (not at all unreasonable in various times in the last ten years), it takes a long time for that to be reflected as many people have their rents fixed, some people have rent control, some landlords will only raise rents on new tenants, etc.

ah, interesting. Ok, so TV dinners != microwave dinners, and maybe they're more healthy than microwaved dinners or food that comes in plastic.

Don't people eat more healthy than they did 50 years ago? Weren't microwave dinners a big thing in the 70s?

>in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children,

huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)

>My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children.

But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]

My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.

Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.

[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!

>LLMs are simply manipulating symbols, they do not have semantic understanding.

falsify this. Show me a way you'd be able to prove they do/don't, that would work for humans.

that seems pretty reasonable. If it makes software engineers 10% more productive that's a bargain.

as in, like, freezing so you get to see it longer?

I've used for dropbox for the last 13+ years, was an early customer, and absolutely love the core product.

However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products.

Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company.

When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc.

Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums. Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos!

Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt.

Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.

There are plenty of people in the bay area who have kids who likely make less than you do.

Yes but with pramp.com you can get real feedback. Sometimes it's not answering wrong, it's cause your communication sucks. Or maybe you're coming across pompous. or maybe too timid. Or maybe you have glaring bugs for certain things. I dunno. You need honest brutal feedback that is actionable.

I'm allergic to dust mites. Clean sheets, sleep well. After 10 days, even with afrin+allergy spray my nasal passages become completely blocked up.

Practice. Use pramp.com. Do super super simple ones. If you can't do two sum or fizzbuzz or tree traversals with someone watching you, you're not going to have a prayer for harder stuff. Just start SUPER simple. Pracitce a lot.

It should be muscle memory to do the easy stuff. And then it turns out, the 'hard' questions are often just a combination of easy things.

Anthropic, Shopify, Apple, Uber, Temu, Spotify, Ebay, Paypal are all massive users who get tons of engineering support.

Also if this rumor is true, they also get massive white glove engineering support: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/21/google-scores-six-year-meta-...

Let me give more detail. Friend #1 is top tier engineering brain (including all the people I've worked with at Google) and extroverted. He probably made 10M+ selling his company (He never told me the number but he has a huge house in a gated community and drives fancy cars, he's rich).

But it took him 10 years and he probably had the chops to get to director/VP level at big tech if he would have grinded on that path.

He's not hurting for money - he lives quite a bit nicer lifestyle than an average FAANG engineer but his ceiling was high on either W2 or starting his own thing. He could definitely retire but now he's just back at it after some time off for the love of the game. He's a grinder by nature.

The other friend is a solid engineer but not top tier, doesn't love the business side of things. So getting acqui-hired into a decent paying job (probably 300k) working remote on his project that got open sourced is probably his dream.

I mean, i'm sure he would have loved to make many millions instead of a tiny acquihire, but he is much happier not having to deal with business stuff. This is a much more realistic view of 'success' than the outlier success storeis you hear on hacker news.

*My advice*

I would find a business partner if you don't love that side of things. Work on this part time, get some seed money, and if you can get a couple PAYING customers part time, then go for it - if you're ok with the more likely outcome of not becoming uber rich.

So just a couple anecdotes of friends of mine who have been in the industry a while:

1 Friend, started a consulting company, worked his absolute ass off, made many millions, but also maybe not a lot more than if he had worked his ass off in big tech and climbed the ranks.

Another friend started a product company, raised a seed round, worked on it for many many years paying himself peanuts, eventually had to take a job at a big tech company for a few years and his side business was part time, then quit big tech to focus on it again, acquihired after 8 years. Now he gets to work on his project and get paid a decent amount by some mid tier tech company, so he's happy.

Financially, not the optimal move, but he loves working on his own ideas, and I think he's happy about that.

Not enough information. Are you making 400k in big tech or 300k at a stable job in a hot location?

Are you making peanuts in a remote location, and you'd be happier making slightly more if you were in charge of your destiny?

If you spend five years on your project to get acquihired by some mid level public company- is that success or would you be devestated?

Do you have the chops to build a business, raise money, find customers, recruit employees? Yes, do you think you'd enjoy it?

Spotify, Ebay, Paypal, Apple, Walmart, Uber are huge users. Lots of other big named companies are big users that I don't think are public.

Then there's Anthropic...huge user.

That's a good point, and why I'm happy to see remote offices pop up in many locations. The problem is the top .1% which can live anywhere, is often a poor representation of the depth of talent density.

not including California? The California drought recently ended and now all the reservoirs are quite full.

The problem is most SWEs in Germany are not as good as most SWEs in the Bay Area. :(

Google has chosen to invest all across the stack in numerous ways. Why do they have 180k people working for them? Because they design their own racks, build their own machines, built their own network, designed their own databases, built their own scheduler, created their own build system, and yes invested in developer tools. I don't know what the coefficients are for each one, but you can go find plenty of older software companies that only try a handful of these and skimp on the rest.

I don't believe any of those companies have as many billion dollar successes as Google. They aren't the only company to do this, but they certainly do it at an unprecedented scale.

If GCP was its own company it would almost be a Fortune 50 company on its own. Youtube would be a Fortune 100 company. That seems a lot more successful than most software companies.

Meta on the other hand, really just has ads.