The document is comparing salaries of staff engineers, and EM's. In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions.

> In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions.

Where do you work?!? If you are in Western Europe then the blogpost is irrelevant for you. The Western European market is weird.

Can you elaborate more about this? Why is it irrelevant in Western Europe?

Western Europe has a very different hiring market for SWEs due to how traditional industries like financial services, media, law, government, pharma, chemicals, and automotive are overrepresented.

In these kinds of organizations, software is viewed as a cost-center and as such the only way you as a SWE can protect yourself is to climb up the management chain as soon as possible.

sure, as long as we're talking about 110 to 170k$ non-managing, technical roles in EU, I'd like to see a full eclipse soon (both exist but I think the latter could be easier to find)

The average VC business is not very strong. They rely on power laws.

The ones that pan out create an ecosystem of related businesses, suppliers, and customers. They create millionaires and billionaires who go on to start their own companies. Strong businesses are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for strong unions.

Normally when you give an unreasonable promise, or have to implement ugly hack then it is known about and explicit that is what is happening. The problems come when you make a unreasonable promise, but no one knows that.

The best AI workflows works heavily with tests at the moment. Having tests up front means the Ai knows its failed, and attempts to fix it.

Isn't fluid intelligence learning? and crystallized intelligence stuff you already know?

It's not one or the other. Those fit in spec driven development already. I have skills that integrate writing and implementing specs.

Promotion at most companies is competitive. So multiple people want the same role. So you need a sorting mechanism.

Counterpoint: in a lot of companies, especially larger companies, roles are designed to fit existing staff, rather than staff being selected for roles.

That's just a bad dev. Good devs don't think of just the happy path. My experience of QA as a quality focused dev has not been good.

The purpose of QA is to identify the unhappy paths that the good devs missed, not to compensate for bad devs.

And yet the tolerance for bad decisions is much higher in bigger companies. Make a bad decision at large company and simple intertia will keep you going. Make a bad decision in a small company and you're out of business.

I mean, last November amazon laid off 14k people claiming pandemic over hiring.

Inertia certainly seems to insulate Jassy from ownership

Yes

They are talking swapping fields completely like going into plumbing. Not simply picking up new tech.