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The problem with the article's conclusion (and title) is that they don't stop with 100,000 -> 1,000 engineers. "Tomorrow, that billion-dollar startup acquisiti
by harpastum 12y ago
The problem with the article's conclusion (and title) is that they don't stop with 100,000 -> 1,000 engineers.
"Tomorrow, that billion-dollar startup acquisition might not need an engineer at all."
The article's claim is not that startups are going to keep having smaller and smaller teams of higher-value engineers, they're saying that they're going to have zero engineers. Which I don't see at all from the evidence provided.
- coldtea 12y agoWell, they might technically have an engineer, but it could be some average joe, using a "21st century" equivalent of Hypercard -- building a whole startup with some composable cloud components and some logic. After all, the basic skills for a successful startup, even today, are not hardcore engineering skills, but idea, business, finances, etc. I mean, most startups bought for multi billion dollars work on BS trivial engineering problems (mostly: make a social web service scalable), compared to what talented engineers do elsewhere (in research, in space exploration, in robotics, in DSP, etc). Heck, wasn't Facebook started with crappy PHP code a 15 year old could write (and a 20 year old did wrote)? Or, for a smaller scale example, Derek Shivers (which I admire) sold his CDBaby startup for a nice sum, and that was also started and based on amateurish code at best that he wrote himself.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]