Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?

Re:Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engine... by mooreds on Sunday July 04, 2021 @08:39AM (#27729200)

I have worked for a few of these. Some things they do:

   * have smaller staffs
   * hire younger/entry/intern level staff
   * outsource to cheap freelancers
   * outsource to agencies (onshore, nearshore, offshore)
   * buy saas solutions and glue things together with tools like Zapier
   * use no-code tools like Excel rather than building software
   * skimp on software process (no staging, no version control, etc)

If the average is 100k, and there is one FAANG developer making $500k, you could have 10 folks making 50k and still have the average work out.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engine... by phone8675309 on Sunday July 04, 2021 @10:21AM (#27729812)

I can echo most of these. The small business I started my career with had a small staff, hired me directly out of college (I started there two weeks after I had my degree), moved all of their infrastructure into the cloud so they could scale on demand, did a lot of work with Excel, didn't use version control until they got bit my a major outage due to the owner developing in production and not having a backup, and finally implemented a staging process for changes after that.

This was all before the rise of SAAS, but I can imagine they're using more of that now.

[ Parent | on HN ]