> they say software doesn't cost them that much. Just because someone says it does not mean it's true. The Internet says SDE comp at amazon is $90-130K. Seems

> they say software doesn't cost them that much. Just because someone says it does not mean it's true. The Internet says SDE comp at amazon is $90-130K. Seems safe to estimate total cost per employee to $125K on average. They're building enough office space for an additional 12,000 employees in Seattle. Assuming there are already 8,000 SDEs that's $1B dollars. I wouldn't call that "not much." Installing a dense rack of servers is in the neighborhood of $150K. How many racks per year would you have to buy to make $1B "round to zero"? What's actually important, and not being explained, is the relationship between the different types of costs and revenue. Developing & operating a service is roughly flat. It doesn't take 10x as much human resources to go from 10,000 requests per second or 100,000. However you will need roughly 10x the hardware resources to serve those requests. The other important property of infrastructure, which is mentioned, is scale. The cost to service each request can actually decrease due to increased utilization and efficiencies. The 10x requests might only require 8x infrastructure, for example.