6 ms·
So, they essentially saved the cost of one good engineer. Question is, are they spending 1 man-year of effort to maintain this setup themselves? If not, they ma
by jscheel 3y ago
So, they essentially saved the cost of one good engineer. Question is, are they spending 1 man-year of effort to maintain this setup themselves? If not, they made the right choice. Otherwise, it’s not as clear cut.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat depends on where they are located. Good engineers aren't 230K$ / year everywhere.
- corobo 3y agoAmericans get paid so much, got dayum. Half that and half it again and I'd still be looking at a decent raise lmao
- m00x 3y ago1-2 weeks vacation if lucky, no overtime pay, 7/24 on-call (spread through team), many startups do 10-12h/day (and amazon), minus healthcare co-pay, etc.
- corobo 3y agoThat (and the other replies, I don't want to spam up the joint replying to all) is a fair point Just to mention, I hope I didn't come across as saying paid too much. I'm always astounded as to how much cash is thrown about over the pond is all. Go get that bag, hell yeah! :)
- uoaei 3y agoThat's about senior-level compensation even among most companies in the Bay Area. Only the extreme outliers with good performance on the stock market can be said to be significantly higher in TC. Edit: even then, TC is tied to how the stock market is doing, and not paid out by the company directly, so it only makes sense to compare with base wage plus benefits.
- dmoy 3y agoTC for senior at big tech companies is over $300k. Over $400k for Facebook I hear. It doesn't take an extreme outlier to get significantly above $250k. > so it only makes sense to compare with base wage plus benefits. Not really, when stock approaches 40%+ of compensation, and is in RSU with fairly fast vesting schedule.
- jacquesm 3y agoIndeed. And it does of course needs to be offset to the cost of living.
- IntelMiner 3y agoIt include an asterisk. Those salaries come with the reality of living in locales like the bay area or Seattle and the like generally, with all the exorbitant costs of living in those areas A lot of companies (like Amazon) will gleefully slash your salary if you try to move somewhere cheaper, because why should we pay you more if you don't just need that money to fork over to a landlord every month? There's also all the things Americans go without, like socialized healthcare. Even with their lauded insurance plans they still pay significantly more for worse health outcomes than any other country
- IshKebab 3y agoNah even with bay area costs Americans get paid much much more than elsewhere. I could easily double my salary by moving from the UK to San Francisco. House prices are maybe double too, but since they are only a part of your outgoings, overall you come out waaaay ahead. Of course then I would have to send my kids to schools with metal detectors and school shooting drills... It's not all about the money.
- the_gipsy 3y agoThe employer es basically subsidizing the mortgage, incentivizing workers to move to the most expensive location, which make these locations even more expensive.
- nxm 3y ago90%+ of Americans have some form of health insurance, especially tech workers. And there are issues with socialized health care as well
- acdanger 3y agoLikely including benefits in this figure.
- cj 3y agoI was curious about this too, but this company lists a range of $200-250k for remote. https://github.com/OneUptime/interview/blob/master/software-full-stack.md https://github.com/OneUptime/interview/blob/master/software-... Side note: I'm in slight disbelief at how high that salary range is compared to how minimal the job requirements are.
- kaydub 3y agoAs someone that works somewhere that goes AWS first and is 100% cloud native, you'd have to give me a massive increase in salary to deal with hardware. Been there, done that, don't care to return to that life.
- op00to 3y agoThat interview process seems … problematic. The whole thing gives really creepy vibes. It doesn’t sound like a super healthy place to work.
- totallywrong 3y agoRight, like AWS is set and forget.
- wholinator2 3y agoExactly. A more accurate figure would be the difference between the work hours spent maintaining bare metal minus the work hours spent maintaining AWS. Impossible to know without internals but at least a point in favor of bare metal
- threeseed 3y agoDepending on what parts of AWS you use it is. Fargate, S3, Aurora etc. These are managed services and are incredibly reliable. Lot of people here seem to think these cloud providers are just a bunch of managed servers. It's far more than that.
- SteveNuts 3y agoEven the "easy" services like that have at least _some_ barrier to entry. IAM alone is a pretty big beast and I doubt someone whose never used AWS would grasp it their very first time logging into the web interface - and every service uses it extensively. And then there's the question of whether you're going to use Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, etc or click through the GUI to manage things. My point is, nothing in AWS is 100% turnkey like a lot of folks pretend it is. Most of the time, it's leadership that thinks since AWS is "Cloud" that it's as simple as put in your credit card and you're done.
- threeseed 3y agoIAM and IaC is only needed once you get to a certain size. For smaller projects you can absolutely get away with just the UI.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y agoIAM is absolutely NOT something you can just ignore unless you have a huge pile of cash to burn when your shit gets compromised.
- politelemon 3y agoThe beauty of decisions like these is that it looks good on a bean counter's spreadsheet. The hours of human time they end up spending on its maintenance simply don't appear in that spreadsheet, but is gladly pushed onto everyone else's plates.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 3y agoThis fiction remains that AWS requires no specialist expertise. And your own computers require expertise so expensive and frightening that no sane company would host their own computers. How Amazon created this alternate reality should be studied in business schools for the next 50 years. Amazon made the IT industry doubt its own technical capabilities so much that the entire industry essential gave up on the idea that it can run computer systems, and instead bought into the fabulously complex and expensive and technically challenging cloud systems, whilst still believing they were doing the simplest and cheapest thing.
- kennydude 3y agoAWS does require some expertise to master considering the sheet number of products and options. Tick the wrong box and cost increases by 50% etc. Different solutions work best for different companies.
- 1980phipsi 3y agoThat's what he's saying.
- FpUser 3y ago>"This fiction remains that AWS requires no specialist expertise. And your own computers require expertise so expensive and frightening that no sane company would host their own computers." Each of these statements is utter BS PS. Oopsy I just read their third paragraph ;)
- deleted 3y ago
- killingtime74 3y agoWith opportunity cost its multiples more. We don't hire people to break even on them right, we hire to make a profit.
- roamerz 3y agoEven if they do spend 1 person-year of effort in maintenance they still may have made the correct choice. Having a good engineer on staff may have additional side benefits as well especially if they could manage to hire locally and that person's wages then contribute to the local economy. As you said though it's definitely not clear cut especially from a spectator's point of view.
- matsemann 3y ago1 man-year effort is probably less than the effort of AWS, though. So a double win! A bit in jest, but places I've worked where we've moved to the cloud ended up with more people managing k8s and building a platform and tooling, than when we had a simple inhouse scp upload to some servers.
- timeon 3y agoIs this not addressed in section 'Server Admins' of the article?