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I've been thinking a lot about this complexity problem too. Tech people are starting to get really arrogant and demand crazy salaries across the board. Right no

I've been thinking a lot about this complexity problem too. Tech people are starting to get really arrogant and demand crazy salaries across the board. Right now this is OK because tech is now seen as a competitive advantage. I wonder if one day some C level is going to look at their IT budget and start to question if technology is really that much of an advantage. For example, at one point is it cheaper to put 10 humans in a call center rather than build online ordering systems and deal with data regulations, app changes, outages, etc?

therealdrag0 5y ago
That (in house tool builders) is not the kind of IT that demands high salaries, it’s the engineers building the call center replacement software (analogy) that demand the high salary. And they make it up in scale. All of these high paid engineers make it up in scale. And you can see it in companies financial statements. It’s not some hand wavy wizardry.
hadlock 5y ago
You need about three engineers to support a ~$500mm/year ecommerce site using managed kubernetes. Really you can do it with two, you need one that understands it, and another guy/apprentice in training who sort of understands it, in case the first guy gets hit by a bus. The third guy is just so the first and second guy don't trade off on-call and get burnt out immediately. Ten or fifteen years ago you'd be looking at a team of at least five, probably 7-10 engineers, mininmum, to design, maintain and keep up to date a similar system. The company gets a tremendous value out of their three engineers at $150-250k/year, ea
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  Managed Kubernetes has really changed the economics of deployment. Kubernetes administration sucks about as much as vSphere or Open Stack. Which is to say: a lot. You can debate the details but you are talking highly trained people and potentially several of them to run a large installation. Plus your management chain now needs to worry about HA, security, upgrade being covered. Managed Kubernetes services like EKS replace that with half a person or less + about $100/month overhead per cluster.

therealdrag0 5y ago

That (in house tool builders) is not the kind of IT that demands high salaries, it’s the engineers building the call center replacement software (analogy) that demand the high salary. And they make it up in scale. All of these high paid engineers make it up in scale. And you can see it in companies financial statements. It’s not some hand wavy wizardry.

hadlock 5y ago

You need about three engineers to support a ~$500mm/year ecommerce site using managed kubernetes. Really you can do it with two, you need one that understands it, and another guy/apprentice in training who sort of understands it, in case the first guy gets hit by a bus. The third guy is just so the first and second guy don't trade off on-call and get burnt out immediately. Ten or fifteen years ago you'd be looking at a team of at least five, probably 7-10 engineers, mininmum, to design, maintain and keep up to date a similar system. The company gets a tremendous value out of their three engineers at $150-250k/year, ea

hodgesrm 5y ago
Managed Kubernetes has really changed the economics of deployment. Kubernetes administration sucks about as much as vSphere or Open Stack. Which is to say: a lot. You can debate the details but you are talking highly trained people and potentially several of them to run a large installation. Plus your management chain now needs to worry about HA, security, upgrade being covered. Managed Kubernetes services like EKS replace that with half a person or less + about $100/month overhead per cluster.