Not true. The vast majority of startups hemorrhage money with inefficiencies. I routinely cut tens of thousands of dollars a month off a startup’s AWS bill. It takes me 30-45min. Why didn’t someone else do it? Too busy, didn’t know about it, didn’t know how.

I keep expecting to find a place that doesn’t need some sort of efficiency cost-saving. I’ve yet to find it.

The fact is there’s a crap-ton of beneficial work to be done anywhere you look. It’s not hard to justify a good salary in the software world.

For example: what if your company could double the speed of your CI/CD system and halve the price? If you move your runners to spot instances in an auto-scaling group you can do that. What’s the return on increasing the productivity of your eng team? Maybe eng salaries times percentage productivity improvement? That number is probably… large.