You miss the major factor in your compensation: pricing pressure due to supply/demand.
By removing all the junior engineers, you've fundamentally changed the market forces longer term and most people expect that to negatively impact you in the supply demand curve regardless of whether or not the statements you've made above are true, which they most likely are for senior engineers.
The author misses the forest for the trees. He's accurately articulating the current state of tools he's using but isn't acknowledging or extrapolating the next derivative I.e the rate of improvement of these tools.
That being said, everything is overvalued and a lot of this is ridiculous.
This entire post smells like someone who's salty and trying not to face reality. I might not even disagree entirely with what's being stated here but the framing is just clearly wrong
Data engineering completely automated by a startups technology. This dataset sells for hundreds of thousands a year and can be fully cleansed and prepared from raw data purely with AI.
OAI spends gobs of money on Mercor and Windsurf telemetry gets them similar data. My guess is they saw their Mercor spend hitting close to 1B a year in the next 5 years if they did nothing to curb it
This is another inflection style "acquisition." Highly unethical of the founders and screws over all your employees and investors who are left holding the bag.
For those asking, c.ai has very high cost and looks like a typical consumer company that burns money for use, so they were decent on revenue but not near profitability.
As an alum, if the students don't love it, they can withdraw. Someone needs to foot the bill for research and education and CMU does not have a large endowment fund
Arguably one of the earliest consumer use cases that found footing was AI girlfriend/boyfriend. Large amounts of revenue spread across many small players are generated here but it's glossed over due to the category.
I think this is why we're seeing that the type of founders YC usually funds in these industries aren't going through YC and choosing alternative methods of getting started.
I have seen them do so in the past. But they need to be very targeted similar to surgery. There's some tumor in the company and you need to identify what that is and remove all of it.