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So why is it then that 23 year old engineers are building everything in SV? It certainly explains a lot about what I see happening there.
by ams6110 10y ago
So why is it then that 23 year old engineers are building everything in SV? It certainly explains a lot about what I see happening there.
- cheriot 10y agoThey have less to loose (already broke), are not accustomed to nice things (never experienced a real salary), and are enthralled by startup culture (so they'll accept shit equity and work all night). There's also a bias in which ones we read about. Nobody puts the age of a 40 year old founder in a headline. I think PG wrote an essay on why ycombinator started out primarily accepting new graduates, but I can't find it right now. Clearly he had a different take.
- onion2k 10y agoHiring ten 23 year olds and paying for 20 servers is cheaper than hiring five 40 year olds and paying for 3 servers. It only becomes a problem when you need to stop burning money, because you can't easily reduce the hardware cost.
- repomies691 10y agoAlso have to take into account that hardware is ridiculously cheap nowadays. You can rent quite a lot of raw computing power with the salary of one engineer.
- Cthulhu_ 10y agoNot to mention one engineer can spin up and operate a big horizontally scaling cluster.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- TuringNYC 10y ago23yo engineers are often also willing to bunk up with three friends in a two bedroom apartment, which makes living in SF/SV more feasible. Once you have a family (generally, older engineers) you generally dont want to be sharing an apartment, so your minimum salary requirements go up.
- hinkley 10y agoI love how everyone always words this like it's perfectly reasonable to expact a salary that has you living like a college student and unreasonable to ask for a salary that lets you live like an actual grownup who worked hard and took some risks to get expertise. Do you guys actually feel that way or is the startupspeak getting to us?
- luca_ing 10y ago> I love how everyone always words this like it's perfectly reasonable to expact a salary that has you living like a college student and unreasonable to ask for a salary that lets you live like an actual grownup If I interpret your parent post correctly, their opinion is than it's not at all reasonable to accept such low salaries. It's just that there are apparently more than enough fools who do it anyway, until they learn that this is both unwise and unsustainable.
- TuringNYC 10y agoThis is exactly what the parent poster (me) was suggesting!
- shalmanese 10y agoIt just comes down to the math of living in a high cost/high compensation area. Your standard of living is highly dependant on the ratio of high economic productivity earners in your unit. I know plenty of young engineers who are easily socking away 60 - 70% of their post tax income because they basically need a futon to sleep on and a macbook and don't really have many needs. After 5 years or so, they'll have half a million in the bank free and clear which is hard to do anywhere else in the country. Now add it a spouse who works in non-profits or is a schoolteacher or any other job that's not tech. Now your expenses have risen 2x but your collective earnings has only risen 1.3x and now you're only saving 20% of your income. Add in a kid and your expenses go up another 50% and your income rises not a jot and all of a sudden, you're in the hole and heading into debt. Low cost/low compensation locations completely flip this equation around since there's no huge disparity in earnings and large families are less of a relative strain. Neither is intrinsically better or worse than the other, they simply suit different lifestyles better.
- caseyf7 10y agoExcept in Juicero's case, the cause wasn't 23 year old engineers, but outsourcing to celebrity designers and engineering firms.
- lmm 10y agoBecause most of the time hardware is cheap and building it quickly but inefficiently is better for the business than hand-aligning your opcodes to use the fastest part of the drum memory.