Tech Economics

A senior engineer costs three times as much as a junior one. At one fintech startup, the math worked out decisively in the expensive hire's favor.

The software stack under every major tech company is largely built on unpaid or underpaid volunteer work. Here's what that actually costs us.

Being first sounds like an advantage. In practice, it mostly means paying for everyone else's education.

The license costs nothing. The operations, security, talent, and maintenance costs will surprise you. Here's what actually happens after you adopt.

The sticker price on cloud compute is almost never what you actually pay. Here's what gets added after you sign up.

Being the market leader sounds like winning. The economics often tell a different story.

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud don't compete on price. They compete on making price comparison so difficult that you stop trying.

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.