I think the culture is one of 'we are doing this for all humankind' and when you get just a few smart people bought in on that level of commitment and they're trying to be lean (and also for sure underpaying themselves compared to what they might make at Big Tech) then you can get impressive results.
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I look at the 1990s picture of Brewster Kahle and think: He surely didn't get paid as much as me, but what did I do? Play insignificant roles in various software subscription services, many of which are gone now. And what did he do? Held on to an idea for decades.
The combined value of The Internet Archive -- whether we think just the infrastructure, just the value of the data, or the actual utility value to mankind -- vastly outperforms an individual contributor's at almost every well-paying internet startup. At the simple cost of not getting to pocket that value.
I wish I believed in something this much.
If you think that's fucked up, do you know how little we pay teachers? Especially preschool-K? Clearly money is just a metric for how much moneying the money had been able to money. Goodhart out it another way: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
1k teachers in Arizona have quit in the last six months because of this.
Over 1,000 Arizona teachers resigning plays a part in shortage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728151 - January 2026
I was a CS teacher for the past two years, so yes. I did it for quality of life reasons while my son learned to walk. But I almost doubled my salary going back to being a software dev.
You can trade off cloud costs for developer time.
AWS is priced as if your alternative was doing everything in house, with Silicon Valley salaries. If your goal isn't "go to market quickly and make sure our idea works, no matter the cost", it may not be the right fit for you. If you're a solo developer, non-profit, or another organization with excess volunteer time and little money, you can very often do what AWS does for a fraction of the cost.
I've found that for data-intensive workloads it isn't just a trade-off—the markup on egress and storage often makes the business model mathematically unviable. I'm bootstrapping a service with heavy image generation and the unit economics simply don't work on AWS.
aren't we told all the time though, that a board of directors beholden to shareholders and a god given edict to make numbers go up are the only way to do things efficiently, to be lean and productive? are you telling me that when people find there's a need for something to happen, they make it happen? for the good of mankind? no billionaires?