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As much as you can say (perhaps not hard numbers, but as a percentage), what was the savings to the bottom line / cloud costs?





Probably ~5% of cloud costs. Combined with the prior round of optimizations, it was substantial.

I was really disappointed when my wife couldn't get the night off from work when the company took everyone out to a fancy steak house.


So you saved the company $10k a month and got a $200 meal in gratitude? Awesome.

I'm not sure how they feel, but when it happens to me, it's not a big deal because it's my job to do things like that. If I fuck up and cost them $10k/month I'm certainly not going to offer to reimburse them.

They're presumably already being paid a salary to do this work.

> So you saved the company $10k a month and got a $200 meal in gratitude? Awesome.

You seem to be assuming that a $200 meal was the only compensation the person received, and they weren't just getting a nice meal as a little something extra on top of getting paid for doing their job competently and efficiently.

But that's the kind of deal I make when I take a job: I do the work (pretty well most of the time), and I get paid. If I stop doing the work, I stop getting paid. If they stop paying, I stop doing the work. (And bonus, literally, if I get a perk once in a while like a free steak dinner that I wasn't expecting)

It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.


Yeah? Well, proper rewards make those savings and optimizations more common. Otherwise most people will do the work needed just to have work tomorrow.

It creates a perverse incentive to deliberately do things a more expensive way at the beginning and then be a hero 6 months down the line by refactoring it to be less expensive.

Ha ha, software developers already have this incentive. Viz: "superhero 10x programmer" writing unmaintainable code to provide some desirable features, whose work later turns out to be much less awesome than originally billed.

Of course the truth is more complicated than the sound bite, but still...


Depends. There are people who put in the absolute minimum work they can get away with, and there are people who have pride in their profession.

That's independent of pay scale.

Granted, if you pay way below expectations, you'll lose the professionals over time. But if you pay lavishly no matter what, you get the 2021/2022 big tech hiring cycle instead. Neither one is a great outcome.


They're more pissed about the 1.2M they spent than about the 10k a month they saved.

What should they have gotten?

They are in theory owed nothing more than their salary but it can be very good for moral to reward that type of thing (assuming they are not introducing a perverse incentive)



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