Which is also what growth companies do? They reinvest their own earnings along with outside investment, which is the same as nonprofits (via donations).
I love history for that. Just knowing about the past gives me a feeling of connection to places I've never been to or times I'll never get to witness.
As an aside, the Scythians were not in what we'd today consider Persia (Iran). They originated around the north coast of the Black Sea, and extended east and southeast from there along the Eurasian steppe.
It truly is fascinating to follow the flow of cultures through time - sometimes coexisting, sometimes crashing against one another, yet other times melting together.
For a look at the least assimilated remaining descendants of Scythians (who were largely absorbed by early Slavs by the early middle ages) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians
This is broadly true, though he did have an impressive victory at the Hydaspes and establish a series of vassal states in the Indian northwest (modern Pakistan). The historical consensus is that it's unlikely he would have succeeded in a Persian-esque conquest of the subcontinent.
Wow, this is a great idea. I recently worked on a team building streaming data pipelines, and we built a bespoke system to do exactly this: end-to-end test our software. We had past messages written to a >300TB sharded file, and wrote a microservice to read each shard and publish it to the message queue for our staging instance, and then run data validation/anomaly detection on the output. It was useful but incredibly painful to use and maintain, and Batch would have been a fantastic solution for accomplishing this.
I'm probably not up for a move to the UK, but if you don't mind, could you tell us a bit more about your job?
What sort of projects have you been able to work on? What's the work culture like? Do you find the actual technical problems you work on exciting, or is it more the domain that excites you (i.e. building and operating a racecar)?
Sure. The role (and myself) are in the aerodynamics department, developing and maintaining software for the aerodynamicists. The role of the aerodynamicist is to develop the bodywork of the car (wings, ducts, chassis shape etc) to improve aerodynamic efficiency. This is done primarily in computational fluid dynamics simulations [1] (virtual) and scale model testing in a wind tunnel [2] (physical) before being tested on the actual race car. My group works on the software to analyse the data output. Think data science dashboards with lots of real time and historical data. Due to our requirements, the tools are designed in house with input from users. In my time here I have worked on interfacing with the HPC cluster, improving visualisations and improving our backend stack amongst other things.
For your last question, it is a bit of both. I went to university with the goal of working in F1 and the competitive aspect is definitely there but as I was not a comp sci student the technical problems are still interesting. Developing aero is very visual heavy as ideas are implemented as 3D CAD designs and often reviewed as such. So it's not just a more complicated stock ticker that needs to be shown.
Early Google engineers are either not billionaires or became executives, divorced from architecture, long ago.
Otherwise, I think becoming a billionaire while purely working on software is extremely unlikely, bordering on impossible. Billion-dollar net worths necessitate leading billion-dollar businesses, and those aren't made solely with code.
See, I'm not so sure about that. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat both joined Google when it was less than a year old, and still work in technical roles. If they each own > 0.1%, they would be billionaires. That seems possible for a very early hire, although I don't know how dilution/IPO would change that.
If not billions, I think it's fair to assume they're each worth several hundred million.
