Tech Economics

Salary is a line item. The actual cost of an engineer is what happens when you get the decision wrong in either direction.

Power law math means a single outlier company can return an entire fund. The uncomfortable truth is that outlier is usually the one the partnership debated cutting.

Open source maintainers collectively produce software worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The vast majority earn nothing for it. That's not sustainable, and the industry knows it.

Market leaders in tech burn capital defending their position. The company just behind them often keeps more money, faces fewer regulators, and builds more durable margins.

Free and open-source software built the internet, runs your cloud, and powers most of the world's most valuable companies. It just wasn't designed to capture any of that value.

When Knight Capital lost $440 million in 45 minutes, the bug got fixed. The organizational conditions that created it went largely unexamined.

List price is the least important number in a cloud contract. The real costs emerge after you've already built everything around one provider.

Winning a market and profiting from it are different skills. The company that fought hardest to get to number one often can't afford to stay there.

The software powering global finance, healthcare, and AI runs on open source code maintained by volunteers. The economics of this arrangement are quietly breaking down.

Winning a market and profiting from it are different things. The economics almost always favor the runner-up.

One developer, one library, and a wake-up call that exposed how the tech industry builds billion-dollar products on infrastructure no one is paid to maintain.

Market leaders spend enormous resources winning dominance. Their closest rivals collect the profits. Here's the structural reason why.

Forgotten code written by engineers who retired decades ago is quietly keeping hospitals, power grids, and financial systems alive. That should worry everyone.

Picking the mid-range cloud tier feels prudent. In practice, it combines the worst cost properties of both ends of the pricing ladder.

Hiring on salary is a trap. The real cost of an engineer is what they don't build, what they break, and how long they stay.

Being first sounds like an advantage. The data says otherwise. Here's the structural reason why followers beat pioneers more often than startup mythology admits.

The download costs nothing. The total cost of ownership is a different conversation entirely.

The logic of picking a mid-tier cloud option seems sound. The math usually isn't. Here's why the gap between sticker price and actual cost is widest right in the middle.