soham

Title. I have loved Sam's writing over the years. He deserves more exposure.

Would love to see some small intros. Any links/sources you may suggest?

Amen

By definition and practicality, schools and fields of work will remain a pyramid i.e. at any given time, there will only be a few fields and colleges that "give advantage", being able to absorb only a fraction of students by competition. e.g. field of programming can only absorb a million odd engineers in next few years. (Ironically, when it absorbs more, it will no longer remain a field with high wages).

The remainder of the iceberg hence, will need to go to other lower parts of the pyramid. ISAs won't do anything for that. Only the government will. And the Govt does it for us, with our money, because not providing education to lower levels of pyramid will result in nothing but societal anarchy.

ISAs hence shouldn't be hailed as panacea for education loans which is what marketing makes us believe. The only advantage of ISAs, is that they unlock better education for some "motivated students" (for lack of an accurate phrase) from underprivileged circumstances. That's not a trivial advantage for those who qualify. I don't know what that % of population is, but it can't be much.

In any case, however small, that number sure seems enough to build a business around it with some feel-good marketing (like this article).

But then such schools that predominantly work on ISAs, will pre-select for good students, who are most likely to succeed and also for industries where the compensation is higher. Remainder (which is arguably 90%+) of the students will still be at the mercy of other schools + taxpayer.

It seems, this just provides one more payment option to students who are likely to succeed anyway and a refreshing business model for schools that move early into the space.

It doesn't address the real problem with schools i.e. making the 20th%le student successful and not a taxpayer burden.

Very much this.

A couple of more points to add:

1. There was a time when the pay distinction between working for big companies and small/mid was clear and present. But these days, the line is blurring.

BigCos have realized that startups are eating their lunch and hence they are investing heavily in new ideas and doing better engineering on the old ones to develop those markets even further, faster.

Smaller companies too have realized that they need to compete with the BigCos and hence have started to offer similar comps/perks. More and more of the VC funded fast-growing companies are offering packages competing with BigCos.

2. Hence, for a software engineer, the main reason to join/not-join a company today is less about pay. It's more about the type of work you will get to do, and the people that you want to work with.

3. There is something to be said about having a brand, but given how tech is percolating everything we do, it is also getting very differentiated. There are hence brands in every "flavor" of tech. e.g. if you want to work on self-driving cars, Waymo is a great brand. But if you want to work on healthcare tech, there are others.

I train software engineers to do better at challenging interviews and I do that for a living. The way I see it, the landscape has been shifting in this direction for at least past 5 years, if not more. At least in the large tech hubs of the US.

Unless your customers need you to incorporate, the idea is to incorporate when you start seeing potential liability. One of the earliest sources of potential liability, is when you hire a W2 employee (in the US). So that is a great time to incorporate i.e. before hiring your first W2 employee. And if you don't intend to raise money, issue stock, or setup international offices any soon, then LLC is a far simpler, cheaper (taxation at exit) structure to setup.

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There are usually several of these $10K ones, especially from angels the founders like and want to have a longer term relationships with. Also, most initial development is either outsourced or done by the founders.

Probably better to hack/FLOSS. But there is a severe lack of structure there. Very easy to get started and get distracted, work on suboptimal projects and in general, never get validation on what you worked on.

For that level of experience, and a great interview performance, big-5 easily cross $225k/yr in total comp. Often much more.