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"scaling makes the engineers lazy to optimize"

I've lost track of the times I've heard "compute is cheap! engineers are expensive!" Except... that compute cost will live forever. The time it takes someone to debug a bad loop or poor query is at worst a one time cost. Longer term, it may even make other stuff faster in the future.



Looking at some numbers on cloud, yeah I don't believe in that statement anymore. End device compute might be cheap, but cloud services certainly are not.


We've also seen a rise (or maybe I just notice it more) of stories of "I changed these 3 lines in 5 minutes and saved my company $40k/month!"

And then you'll get responses like "pfft.... that's hardly the cost of one part time FAANG person who makes $680k/year - what's the point?"

And around we go...




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