Comment by dunkelheit
6 years ago
> The reason why is the math changed. The gap between startup and tech giant is much larger now than it was in 2010.
This is true but also kind of depressing. With the means of software production cheaply available to everybody is that stable job at a tech giant really the pinnacle of the software engineering career? I understand that everybody's got the bills to pay, kids to raise etc. and maybe I'm a bit naive but it just feels... wrong. And yes, working at BigCo can provide some interesting technical challenges, opportunities to impact millions of users and shield you from unpleasant interactions with the outside world. But it still feels like you are being paid premium to sit on the sidelines.
I find a lot of joy in smaller, industry niche companies. Like 1-20 employees small. Not VC funded startups, but long running companies with proven value in an industry outside of the startup bubble.
There is a lot of them, and they can be very rewarding to work at. While they'll have less compensation, it's in real money and they're often located in smaller cities with lower cost of living. You get to work directly with clients/customers to provide value to them with your skillset. The pace is steady, and what you work on can have a lot of longevity which is nice. Software can feel somewhat ephemeral at times, written one month, thrown away the next. Working on a long term project means it feels worthwhile to go the extra mile.
Just curious can you give examples of this?
A few examples of ones I have worked at or friends have:
A company that created a novel commercial solar estimation algorithm, and ran a B2B SaaS with it.
A small platform specific agency, 10-20 people specializing in a specific eCommerce platform.
A company that had been producing IoT software and devices for farmers.
A slightly bigger company that produced backbone software for bank management, I think they had closer to 100 employees eventually but the dev team was still relatively small. Bank software takes a lot of extra curricular activity it turns out!
> This is true but also kind of depressing. With the means of software production cheaply available to everybody is that stable job at a tech giant really the pinnacle of the software engineering career?
Yes, because economies of scale greatly benefit big companies.
Just because software is free to scale, in the sense that a cp command doesn't cost you anything, doesn't mean that making money from software is free to scale.
> Yes, because economies of scale greatly benefit big companies.
I don't think software engineering in itself benefits greatly from the economies of scale. Yes, tech giants have developed some nice internal tooling, but the cost of implementing a feature for a google engineer is probably in the same ballpark as for a startup engineer. User acquisition OTOH seems substantially cheaper for the big companies. So, economies of scale in marketing and distribution?
If they don't then why does anybody use AWS?
6 replies →