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It doesn't seem that useless to me. Sure a better, less hyperbolic measure would've been saying there were x number of offers given, but assuming ~$100K salaries, that means there were about 300 job offers given out for 88 engineers.

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If these were elite software engineers and the compensation was $100,000 per year, then either (a) the auction did not work, or (b) that is a fair market value for engineers (which would mean that the auction worked, but the raison d'etre for it is suspect).

Engineering comp. is a long discussion, but I don't think the best engineers are under-compensated so much as under-utilized. Companies pay appropriate to the work people are doing, but staff engineers 3-5 years below what they're usually capable of.

I don't think he was claiming that $100k was a good or bad offer. He was doing napkin math. If the offers were within the ballpark of $100k (a nice round number), then there were about 300 offers. Which makes the given $30m number not useless at all.

For all we know it was 600 job offers @ $50k, or 1200 @ $25k. Because no where do we learn how many offers took place. Nor does it say if they are counting multiple offers per bidder.

But boy does $30 million in job offers sure sound good for a weary journalist, amirite?

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