Let’s Talk Money: What Engineers Are Actually Making

Let’s Talk Money: What Engineers Are Actually Making

I’m on the fence about salary transparency. I have seen some questionable researches suggest it can backfire, making people feel worse or even hurting their earnings by 2%. Others say it helps employees negotiate better deals. So, who knows?

That said, I really respect the engineers who openly share their salaries. Having real numbers—not just vague industry averages—makes it easier to understand how the market actually looks and what to expect. So, here are some publicly shared salary updates from engineers. Hopefully, this gives a better sense of how compensation stacks up.

Debugging Hetzner: Uncovering failures with powerstat, sensors, and dmidecode

Ubicloud provides cloud services on bare metal providers such as Hetzner or AWS Bare Metal. Recently, they faced an issue with the new Hetzner server generation—AX162—which had a 16 times higher crash rate than the AX161.

In this post, Burak explains their approach to debugging the issue, which is well worth a read, particularly if you manage a bare metal system.

AFR (Annualized Failure Rate) is a common way to measure hardware reliability. It estimates how likely a device or component is to fail within a year and is measured as follows:

In summary, here is the problem solving approach they took:

1. Monitor system load – Were the new servers overloaded?

2. Check temperatures (via sensors) – Overheating problem?

3. Inspect hardware (lshw, dmidecode) – Manufacturing defect?

4. Measure power consumption (powerstat) – Were they getting enough power?

The outcome? The actual power consumption was significantly lower than the advertised maximum — Hetzner might be capping power usage.

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JavaScript Visualized: Event Loop, Web APIs, (Micro)task Queue

JavaScript can only do one thing at a time since it’s single-threaded. But it still handles multiple tasks smoothly thanks to the event loop.

Here’s how it works: When JavaScript needs to run something that takes time—like a network request—it hands it off to the browser. Once that task is done, the browser puts the result in a queue, waiting for JavaScript to pick it up.

There are two queues: one for microtasks and one for regular tasks. Microtasks always run first. These mostly come from promises and async/await. Regular tasks, like setTimeout callbacks, wait their turn. After every task, JavaScript checks for any leftover microtasks before moving on.

That’s why promises seem to resolve before timeouts, even if the timeout has already hit zero!