it is like old school with time sharing systems -- you gotta be efficient when your turn comes up in the lab on the punch card and mainframes... instead of the mindless and endless trial-n-error hacking we are used to these days?
Sure why not -- I mean redshift is a cluster of Postgres databases as well. What you don't get is scale -- so its fine for a small data warehouse (in which case is it really a data warehouse...)
This is a good story for all to realize -- you CAN talk about your OWN pay to anyone you want. Every employer I know has tried to say "you can't do that" or "its in your contract" and I would rebuff and say the contract is illegal/non-binding as it goes against labor laws (in the US as per various labor laws and an executive order as recently as Obama). I get really annoyed w/ HR in firms -- their goal is to stop information from being shared to control things. On the flip side I do not agree that just because your colleague makes X that you deserve X. Pay never consistent and I have no problem with that part given we aren't clones of each other either.
Hmm i think the pace of changes has made software break more, but unit tests and integration tests are an improvement. But I agree writing unit tests takes a hella lotta time, not sure if a sr eng should be doing that 1/2 the time