Most players that had this amount of compute also tend to pay less than the equivalent corporate wage, and so besides being a good way to stress-test your cluster (prior to general availability), it gives you the positive feeling of “I helped make this, I help run this.”
It's really just a huge premium to get a team of people (this is important) who have built something similar to what you want to build (also important).
And you get the IP as well, which is nice. In some cases you're consolidating power and shutting down competitors. It makes a lot of sense in some situations.
I think the nice benefit here is because of OPs infrastructure experience and process, he can now quickly run and test new ideas and projects for a reasonable marginal cost. Seems legit. Very clean setup.
Because everyone benefits. The helpers get first hand experience, the helped get rapid scaleup of capabilities. Nobody’s interested in messing this up as everybody knows they might be next. This is the sort of positive feedback that keeps the world turning.
The article sounds like you enjoyed building the system you put together, and I think that's probably a seriously undervalued aspect of why someone might take on this kind of work.
Why does this feel like a good use of skills and time to you? I ask because to my mind it feels like a value scraper rather than a value maker, so I'm genuinely curious.
Yeah.... but also a good way to get paid for a lot of people who then go on to start up new and interesting things that may or may not get dominated by the big 6.
Some people will swear that being around other people building things has value that is hard to quantify. Someone will reply with their anecdote about how, while working in a shared workspace environment, they met someone who became instrumental to their company's success. That's what I hear every time this conversation is had.
To me it sounds a bit like playing the networking lottery at a very high cost.
"Winning" a national lab definitely confers benefits far beyond just financial ones – these are, by definition, the biggest deployments in the world. Both the technical experience setting these up, and the reputational benefit associated with this, is worth a great, great deal. (I don't know how much money HPE Cray makes, for example, but I'm sure it's not the money it makes that's stopped HPE from quietly sunsetting the brand.)
Yeah, I mean also from a financial/business standpoint I totally get it.
The incentive is to target content efforts towards enterprise and large-scale orgs. Because who cares if the indie dev or small startup is running your stack, let's be real.
That might be hyperbolic, but directionally I agree. The interesting part is that there are enough of those people out there in enterprise who fall into that "don't really know what they're doing but want to try something cool" bucket to keep Databricks flush with cash for years on end.
It seems is ensuring a good bar that a good developer needs to cross, this seems great for the businesses involved with the crewscale, it ensures them pure tech talent.
This makes sense. In software, there's fairly small amount of really interesting work, and an endless ocean of mundane drudgery otherwise. Giving the interesting work to your high-performing veterans as a non-monetary reward is your best bet to get good results, and to retain them.
1) It gives me hope that it could turn into something more. You could consider this along the same emotional reward people get from buying a lottery ticket. Whether the odds are worse or better are debatable :)
2) Allows me to learn technologies that interest me but are not used in my day-job.
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