Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
The native tool use is a game changer. When I ask it to debug something it can independently add debug logging to a method, run the tests, collect the output, and code based off that until the tests are fixed.
Living off 20k a year in a Hcol, where these salaries primarily occur, is next to impossible. Rent alone anywhere in SF area, for example San Jose, is 2k at a bare minimum for a 1BR, or 3k for a 2BR split between a roommate at 1.5k each. That means rent is 18k-24k, not to mention other living expenses (car, utilities, food, travel to visit family, etc.)
They did not spend half their revenue on compute. It’s more like 20-25% for running data enters/staff for DCs. Check their earnings report.
Whats app is not an applicable comparison because messages and videos are stored on the client device. Better to look at Pinterest and snap, which spend a lot on infra as well.
The issue is storage, ads, and ML to name a few. For example, from 2015:
“ Our Hadoop filesystems host over 300PB of data on tens of thousands of servers. We scale HDFS by federating multiple namespaces.”
You can also see their hardware usage broken down by service as put in their blog.
Excluding a settlement from 2014 that was paid this year, Twitter would have made 500mil on 5B revenue in 2021. They were also GAAP profitable in 2019.
Additionally, the incentive from wall street is to spend all your money to grow users. Whether that is right or wrong it’s the path they chose which led to users and revenue roughly doubling over 5 years.
Yes that is the normal case. The post was refuting the assertion that one engineer can run these services indefinitely as previously the OP had the help of SWEs oncall and also fixing bugs.
Nothing, because they don’t understand RecSys which is half of ML at social media companies. Probably could help with prediction for ads but the domains are very different.
IME for engineering at these companies is that the social or political side of things is mostly irrelevant for Eng. Some folks want to be involved in internal activism but it’s easy to ignore and basically never comes up in Eng work. Ppl just avoid politics like normies and talk about average stuff like “how’s your kid?” not “let’s go to that protest”. Lots of good smart technical peeps more likely to nerd out on cool tech stuff than be political.
This is assuming that political power comes from influencing all Americans rather than a small fraction who hold true power (politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc.). If the small fraction is all on Twitter then viola the rhetoric is meaningful.
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”