There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc. Rationally if these people were required to fix or maintain such systems their yearly value would be in the millions wouldn't it?
For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier. Do they deserve to be?
You jest, but my first job[1] was back in 2005-ish for a small company[2] in Slovenia building web dashboards for Slovenia's nuclear power plant[3]. PHP and good old forms. My job was parsing the XML data and feeding it into some sort of graph component. Can't remember if they gave me a built graph component or I had to build one from scratch.
Not the kind of startup you'd hear about on HN of course.
And no, I don't know what the motivation was for the nuclear power plant to issue a RFP that involved web dashboards. Maybe upgrading their interfaces from the analog ones built in the 80's?
of course, Berkeley will need to abandon its "nuclear free zone" policy. but i see that as a solvable problem, once they recognize the potential for revenue enhancement.
In all seriousness, there have been attempts at startups looking to disrupt the nuclear industry. It's hit several problems, in the form of bad science and harsh regulation.
Apparently hacking plutonium is not easily accomplished.
> There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc.
Yeah. I see a lot of COBOL guys that are extremely critical resources for big enterprises. As GP said, they are not paid like C-suite executives, but not very far from it, and no one asks them how they spend their time. Needless to say they are a very relaxed bunch.
A colleague of mine was involved in verifying the software that controlls the shut-down procedures of the Darlington [0] plant. Now he's working on proofs of block-chain ciphers of some sort or another. I don't believe he's quite rich but he can certainly be rather selective of job opportunities.
> For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier
From stories I've heard, in these situations people like to come in not as employees but as consultants, at which point there are many hundreds of dollars per hour spent.
That actually relieves some concerns I had, given the root comment (which I have to admit, caused some distress). I imagine there are more people currently in the Navy that might leave if the demand and pay were high enough. Hopefully that covers enough of the important skill-sets needed.
