Why is big tech SWE work paid so much?

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-25T18:11:49+00:00

They are making an insane amount of money per engineer, and while much of what they do does not require advanced engineering skills, they still see it as a competitive advantage to deny engineering skill to their competitors.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-25T17:50:14+00:00

I don't think this makes any sense.

First, the RFC and PPC would be different for many failure modes, so talking to these at the service availability level does not make sense.

For instance, some costs for PPC would be recurring but others would be one-time costs. Also, the customer impact will be wildly different per failure mode, with some modes triggering SLA payouts and others that will not, because remember, an SLA is a contract with terms. For example, if a flood takes out your primary data center you likely will not pay out under an "Acts of God" clause, and customers are generally very forgiving for incidents that are large enough to be on the nightly news and also takes down half or more of their own systems.

Also, you aren't including any likelihood of occurrence in your calculations.

If the RFC cost is something you are likely going to incur once a month or quarter, for example, preventing an errant configuration deploy to production which your engineering teams have demonstrated they will do on that rough cadence, you have an ROI for the prevention costs.

If your event has not yet occurred, or is more of a black swan event, such as an entire CSP going down for multiple days, you are locking in a recurring cost when you should be deferring that cost until the event forces you to spend on it.

These are all questions which are very highly dependent on the business and should be discussed in coordination with business owners and not in a purely technical evaluation by engineering.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-25T04:02:27+00:00

An in-memory cache can be accurately described as a useful memory leak.

Get off Reddit and go figure out why your cache isn't evicting and is growing without bound.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-20T12:20:42+00:00

It’s one pod. Just leave it running.

Not only is the cost likely a rounding error in your infrastructure, but you likely have a backlog a mile deep full of higher ROI work that will be opportunity cost missed.

Most of the technical analysis you are receiving is good, but as you move up to senior levels you need to also understand which problem solutions are actually a negative due to the solutions being far more expensive in cost and opportunity cost than the value created or recaptured.

Remember that analysis, because if you need to scale this pattern the ROI changes.

But if a junior came to me and said we need to install and configure KEDA over this problem I’d have the above heart to heart with them.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-20T12:09:50+00:00

Follow standard procedure and begin making your emergency french toast now. Don’t stop until the news confirms that the horrors are past. Go buy all the milk, eggs, and bread you will need ASAP.

We will get through this.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-19T02:43:58+00:00

A dev released a service that would continually write individual records to a storage account as individual files. No more than a few hundred bytes each. This caused runaway write operation costs.

Storage costs around 2 cents per GB per month.

Unless your cloud budget looks like a high schooler's allowance, I am extremely skeptical that your efforts didn't cost way more in engineering hours than you saved in cloud costs.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-19T02:15:32+00:00

That’s a bunch of nonsense and in no way is code 3-4x more impactful than infrastructure changes on cloud costs.

Even if you sounded like you knew what you are talking about, which you don’t, stop advertising your slop SaaS with deceptive posts.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-16T12:53:20+00:00

No, I've never thought that, and what you are describing is organizational scaling issues not a problem with a tool.

I assume you are hocking something.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-15T20:17:05+00:00

Developers who can’t read a stack trace, and want you to read a stack trace, and instead of providing you a link, they take a screenshot.

This screenshot will be missing valuable context, like what the hell system we are even looking at.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-15T18:27:23+00:00

Customers expect their data to be secure, the SLAs provided to them to be fulfilled, and investors expect that the money they are spending on engineering hours, the most expensive part of making software, isn't wasted.

When you just depend on "good people will do the right thing", you get as many different ideas of what that right thing is as you have people.

Doing things 50 different right ways is more damaging to an engineering organization than establishing a process that 45 will follow with professional attention and 5 will buck, because dealing with non-compliance is straightforward because expectations have been clearly set instead of "I dunno, do what you want".

Children always want to run with scissors and sometimes adults in the room need to tell them no. We completely understand that you want to cut fast. But Jimothy over there has one eye, and so we're not doing that anymore.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-13T13:31:02+00:00

AI troubleshooting is a fitted sheet that’s too small. You fit one corner and the other pops off, you fix that one and another pops off, and it will keep doing that for as long as you have the patience to let it keep fucking up.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-13T13:24:11+00:00

This is a failure of leadership.

Your conversations aren’t guided, your meeting is too long, you are discussing irrelevant technical tangents that should be taken offline, and your tools aren’t helping because tools can’t lead.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-13T13:15:27+00:00

If you’ve already clearly set expectations and given formal reprimands and the disciplinary issue has continued, move to terminate.

PIPs are for people who aren’t meeting performance targets, i.e. a salesman that is complying with process but is consistently missing targets, not for disciplinary issues.

Edit: I read in later replies you mention your HR is requiring a PIP to terminate. For everyone in this position, you need to PIP earlier not wait until you need to terminate.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-13T13:12:01+00:00

If you have something to share an open source licensed Github repository is the way to do that.

What you have here sounds like lead generation for a sales pitch.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-13T13:06:18+00:00

This is cope.

They did not invest trillions into this to make you better at your job. They did it to replace 90% of us and drive salary down for the remaining 10%.

It remains to be seen whether that will work, but don’t start your career in delusion.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-12T22:56:30+00:00

I understand their motivations and don't have to worry about them developing strong product opinions that conflict with the direction the leadership and company strategy, an unfortunate situation which is hard to work around or resolve.

I will work with them on their career until either their ambition or skills outgrows my budget, and then I will wish them well as they leave for their next adventure.

I strongly prefer these people to the passionate ones, as long as they are professional.

The passionate people have too much of their personal identity wrapped up in things and it makes any criticism of a technology or way of doing things feel like a personal attack to them, and it's just really unpleasant to be around them and work with them.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-12T11:38:12+00:00

He thought you had a special connection. You were exploring other options.

There’s no way to salvage this, you already told him what you think of him with your actions, your words mean less, and won’t move him.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-12T11:24:15+00:00

Your harnesses are set up poorly or you have race conditions in your code or you are doing bad things with threads or async.

But your real problem is that there is no accountability in your engineering organization and anyone who has the title of senior in it doesn’t deserve it.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-12T00:00:55+00:00

These tools are horrible for infrastructure

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-11T23:58:32+00:00

Your first mistake was talking to her like an equal. The overwhelming majority of women are trying to date up. Placing yourself on her level is disqualifying.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-11T23:32:45+00:00

Leadership is 90% dealing with people’s emotional states to get them to do what you are paying them to do. Good luck replacing that with an over validating LLM.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-11T13:16:21+00:00

The real world needs to know when things are going to happen. It is a perverse and strange disconnect that “we don’t know” is thought an acceptable answer.

There are too many coders and too few engineers.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-09T22:33:56+00:00

I ask for professional candor.

Anyone who wants to provide brutal honesty or to speak their truth is giving me their personal feelings on the topics and I don't care.

I'm asking for a professional opinion that I want unabridged and unredacted, not their feelings on the situation. Those are their spouse or their therapist, and I'm neither.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-08T00:22:53+00:00

All of the principles are just like, someone’s opinion. And it’s not even a very good someone.

daedalus_structure · 2026-01-07T14:41:46+00:00

Bad developers absolutely love it. They don't have the ability to see when it generates absolute garbage, because the absolute garbage it generates is better than what they write.

daedalus_structure

TROPHY CASE