For those people facing financial ruin, having more money eliminates the immediate fear caused by not having enough. Once life's necessities are taken care of though, what else can money really buy? Wouldn't happiness plateau at some point?
The salient point is flatter organizations along with the feedback loops that surround developers has changed the role an engineering manager plays. Drucker was correct (as usual) about the knowledge worker's primacy in the modern organization.
Sounds to me like he is suffering from a social comparison bias. A few peers may have done better than he, but I am sure there are those out there that would say he has done pretty good.
I've heard that grad students go through something very similar when they go to grad school: feelings of inferiority and fears of being "exposed" as fake when surrounded by so many other intelligent people.
I've never worked for a start-up but imagine the start-up scene works the same given the common stereotypes: success stories of 20-year-olds, hyper intelligent ivy-league drop-outs, etc. I don't know whether they're the rule or the exception to it.
The HANA integration is more marketing blurb than a true integration at this point. It's meant to draw in the stats guys so other SAP products can be sold to them.
The title sounds a bit ominous for an article that really only attempts to show how Hadoop was a stepping stone to a more refined set of tools at Google.
