As someone that identified a bug in a Drobo firmware once and was offered a job on the spot I think the problem with attracting talent is two fold.
The first problem is really two parts, not only is it rare to find people who have passion for storage related technologies but very few will gain exposure to these technologies to develop that passion.
Kids don't routinely grow up with a SAN in the house. They do tend to grow up with lots of internet connected consumer caliber devices and can easily gain exposure to working with these technologies.
I was fortunately able to explore this type of technology in depth because a family owned business let me tinker with their server equipment in high school.
After college I then co-founded a startup back before the cloud became big. That meant we needed to make use of old hardware to provide service to our customers at a price point that made our service profitable. Old drives were not a reliable way to do that. New drives were extremely expensive for old servers back in the day when SCSI was the interface that you expected for a server. We had to get creative and play with JBOD devices. ZFS was an amazing tool for us in those days, and it still is for anyone who wants to tinker.
The other aspect is that while these skills are valuable for creating a "job" they do not have potential for creating "massive wealth". Why learn about storage if you aren't going to be part of the first 10 employees at a company that has a $10B exit? Let Amazon and the other cloud vendors worry about that stuff.
Knowledge is power though. I recently came across an AI startup that I'm now helping. They were spending significant money using GPU computational power to provide artificial intelligence training through a cloud provider. They blew through about $300k in credits within the first year to give you an idea of how much money that type of power can cost.
I am now helping them cut over to their own co-location facility. The first year alone they will save so much money it will pay for the next three years.
Reading that helps reinforce the idea that no matter what path you are on in the field there is potential that some random thing you learned about an SSD firmware helps you optimize some growth stage companies product and ultimately that helps you build wealth.
>very few will gain exposure to these technologies to develop that passion.
This, exactly.
SSD firmware is opaque, hard to learn from outside. On the other hand, trending web-based framework has all the source code opened, with great documents, and ready to use tools. No wonder young people of today find passion on other things rather than SSD.
I'm mostly curious because I work in a storage-adjacent field (NAS) for a BigCorp and the pay is pretty good, if not quite FAANG level. It's not a startup by any means, but I will easily become a multi-millionaire in a handful of years. I was curious about the other side of the fence.
Huh? If you're going to "easily become a multi-millionaire in a handful of years", then your pay is more than pretty good, and certainly not worse than FAANG level.
Sorry, handful of years from today. I've been working for 7 years now. FAANG comp would probably be 20%-25% higher; I'm mostly good at keeping my expenses down and saving a high proportion of my income. I've also had the good fortune of the bull market working in my favor for the entire time I've been employed.
Even at that pedestrian level, if you pack them tightly enough I could imagine fitting a few billion years at least into the volume of an average-sized handful!
Sorry, handful of years from today. I've been working for 7 years now. FAANG comp would probably be 20%-25% higher; I'm mostly good at keeping my expenses down and saving a high proportion of my income. I've also had the good fortune of the bull market working in my favor for the entire time I've been employed.
It's been about 5+ years at this point so I don't recall all of the details. I can recall that they offered me a job after I pointed out the bug. From what I recall, I politely declined but I helped them test a beta firmware for a while.
>The other aspect is that while these skills are valuable for creating a "job" they do not have potential for creating "massive wealth". Why learn about storage if you aren't going to be part of the first 10 employees at a company that has a $10B exit? Let Amazon and the other cloud vendors worry about that stuff.
That seems like a completely ridiculous way to try to organize your life. Almost no companies have $10B exits.
The first problem is really two parts, not only is it rare to find people who have passion for storage related technologies but very few will gain exposure to these technologies to develop that passion.
Kids don't routinely grow up with a SAN in the house. They do tend to grow up with lots of internet connected consumer caliber devices and can easily gain exposure to working with these technologies.
I was fortunately able to explore this type of technology in depth because a family owned business let me tinker with their server equipment in high school.
After college I then co-founded a startup back before the cloud became big. That meant we needed to make use of old hardware to provide service to our customers at a price point that made our service profitable. Old drives were not a reliable way to do that. New drives were extremely expensive for old servers back in the day when SCSI was the interface that you expected for a server. We had to get creative and play with JBOD devices. ZFS was an amazing tool for us in those days, and it still is for anyone who wants to tinker.
The other aspect is that while these skills are valuable for creating a "job" they do not have potential for creating "massive wealth". Why learn about storage if you aren't going to be part of the first 10 employees at a company that has a $10B exit? Let Amazon and the other cloud vendors worry about that stuff.
Knowledge is power though. I recently came across an AI startup that I'm now helping. They were spending significant money using GPU computational power to provide artificial intelligence training through a cloud provider. They blew through about $300k in credits within the first year to give you an idea of how much money that type of power can cost.
I am now helping them cut over to their own co-location facility. The first year alone they will save so much money it will pay for the next three years.
Then you read articles like this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
Reading that helps reinforce the idea that no matter what path you are on in the field there is potential that some random thing you learned about an SSD firmware helps you optimize some growth stage companies product and ultimately that helps you build wealth.