Tech companies pay for few things more than for developer time. In a small company, spending one day to speed up a 30 minute build of a codebase used by 10 developers by 1 minute is not going to unlock much developer time, but imagine you multiply it by a thousand or ten thousand developers. Suddenly you save 10 thousand minutes per build, or 166 hours. Imagine the average dev runs a build three times per day, your 1 minute saving is now saving 498 hours of developer time per day, or 62 8 hour work work days per day (and there is the saying that in FANG it's way less than 8 hour work days). These are continuous cost savings, so the value your 1 day investment created is equivalent to 62 fully paid developers. Isn't that amazing?
I think tech companies should spend a lot more on speeding up their stack. I would love to do something like this (improving developer workflows in a giant organization) as my day job.
The counter argument here is that that 1 minute difference doesn’t correspond to a minute of extra work in the way that ‘62 days of work saved’ conveys. But the counter-counter argument is that sufficiently fast/good tooling is qualitatively different and increases productivity by enabling new workflows (eg build it vs think carefully about whether it will compile right because builds are slow; break up changes into smaller chunks vs write big hard-to-review changes because CI is slow) such that speeding up tools or maintaining performance as the code base grows are valuable.
I think tech companies should spend a lot more on speeding up their stack. I would love to do something like this (improving developer workflows in a giant organization) as my day job.