Comment by vkou
6 years ago
> 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?
Start-ups use AWS because with $20k-$100k in credits you can do a lot for free in the first year, and after that the cost difference usually doesn't matter. It also looks great on everyone's CV.
Big companies ofc have other reasons like flexibility, needing less coordination in the company etc.
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