What fraction of internship cost do you think intern salaries are? (I have no idea) If full-time employees are taking pay cuts, seems like interns should also take pay cuts (even just considering fairness, not finances)
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Replying to @PaulsonJonathan
Based on what else I shipped last year, if I hadn't had an intern last year, I expect I would've shipped another $5M/yr of savings, i.e., profit, last year. We pay our interns ~$50/hr all in? 50*40*12 = 24k. If I assume a 4% interest rate, that's equivalent to ~$1k/yr, ~1/5000th
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Replying to @danluu
From the linked threads, Lyft was paying $10k/month not 2k/month. My guess is most internship’s senior dev time is worth less than $5M/yr (full time comp seems like a better baseline?); hard to believe the recruiting is worth the cost at that point.
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Replying to @PaulsonJonathan
This is a different topic, but IMO, it's very difficult to defend hiring interns and non-senior devs on practical grounds and the case should be made on general principles or morals. I think people don't feel comfortable making that case and then make up bogus practical cases.
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Replying to @danluu @PaulsonJonathan
Under some assumptions, I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but my subjective impression is that the number of companies where a senior IC can ship seemingly trivial optimizations that save 7+ figures annually is very small. Let's even say "up to a three month project".
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The number of companies where a significant % of ICs have that opportunity, rather than those on teams where such improvements are more likely to be found (i.e. infra), can be counted on one hand.
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If you want to say team boundaries are a fiction, sure, but then the relevant figure is the number of such available improvements, not the number of engineers capable and willing to make them.
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Replying to @rmushkatblat @PaulsonJonathan
Sure, but it's 100% of the companies in the list, which is the scope of the tweet. The number of opportunities is effectively unbounded from an individual perspective, although there's obviously a limit. Whenever I want to, I can spend 1hr and find a 7-figure opportunity, and
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we're not even a v. large company, should be easily 10x that at large companies. The reason I and others don't pick the free money up off the ground is that it's pretty strongly disincenvitized, shipping a single $20M/yr change beats 200 $1M/yr changes for silly political reasons
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And IMO it's wrong to say infra only, I've seen similar opportunities on revenue and product teams. Revenue for obvious reasons, product since latency reductions also drive revenue. Just for example, I know of one set of client-side optimizations, done on paternity leave, that
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increased overall company revenue by ~1% for a large company, which is a mind boggling amount of money. It was done on paternity leave because, per the discussion above, companies don't actually try to make money and the dev couldn't permission to do the work from their manager.
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Replying to @danluu @PaulsonJonathan
Yes, didn't mean to imply those opportunities were limited to infra teams, just an example. Disagree w.r.t. Lyft, their R&D expenses in 2019 were ~600m, for an upper bound on reducing costs (realistically, less than 20% of that). >1k engineers in Jan 2019.
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Opportunities to generate additional revenue (or improve similar "positive" metrics) seem categorically different than optimizations/cost-saving improvements, though I agree they fall into a similar class of issues which are under-invested in due to poor incentive alignment.
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