Comment by conductr

No, I’m the type of person who thinks tech salaries are bloated in certain areas and certain companies and that does not follow the distribution of talent. It’s followed the distribution of VC money and profits of large companies. The evidence of such is that the median software engineer in the US is in the low-mid $100s (depending on what source I want to believe it’s $110k-$140k). But I also believe that same talent can be sourced outside the US is many cases and for far less expense.

I also view most apps/tech as not very novel. It’s largely the same engineering “problems” that are known and well documented. A lot of it can be done by average developers and “top tier” talent isn’t usually needed other than probably the cryptographic components in Signal’s case. Scale is certainly a concern, but that is a familiar problem that’s has a lot of documentation solutions and approaches.

I could be wrong. Maybe they’re already doing this and it just happens most of their expense is going to a couple high paid execs. Could be that I’m underestimating the complexity as well. But I find my statements to be true in many cases. I can even point to the number of times I’ve talked to consultants and top tier devs about building things for me. What they would charge $1m for I can often piece together for less than $50k by hiring a few folks in low COL areas and then just spending a little effort refactoring their code to be as pretty as I like it to be; sometimes I outsource that too but the point is having a whole company of top tier talent isn’t usually necessary, it’s a choice. Just like believing that top tier talent only exists in the high cost tech hub cities is a choice more so than the truth.