> I don't understand this. Developer time is so much more expensive than machine time. Do companies not just double their CI workers after hearing people complain? It's just a throw-more-resources problem.
I'd personally agree. But this sounds like the kind of thing that, at many companies, could be a real challenge.
Ultimately, you can measure dollars spent on CI workers. It's much harder and less direct to quantify the cost of not having them (until, for instance, people start taking shortcuts with testing and a regression escapes to production).
That kind of asymmetry tends, unless somebody has a strong overriding vision of where the value really comes from, to result in penny pinching on the wrong things.
It's more than that. You can measure salaries too, measurement isn't the issue.
The problem is that if you let people spend the companies money without any checks or balances they'll just blow through unlimited amounts of it. That's why companies always have lots of procedures and policies around expense reporting. There's no upper limit to how much money developers will spend on cloud hardware given the chance, as the example above of casually running a test 10,000 times in parallel demonstrates nicely.
CI doesn't require you to fill out an expense report every time you run a PR thank goodness, but there still has to be a way to limit financial liability. Usually companies do start out by doubling cluster sizes a few times, but each time it buys a few months and then the complaints return. After a few rounds of this managers realize that demand is unlimited and start pushing back on always increasing the budget. Devs get annoyed and spend an afternoon on optimizations, suddenly times are good again.
The meme on HN is that developer time is always more expensive than machine time, but I've been on both sides of this and seen how the budgets work out. It's often not true, especially if you use clouds like Azure which are overloaded and expensive, or have plenty of junior devs, and/or teams outside the US where salaries are lower. There's often a lot of low hanging fruit in test times so it can make sense to optimize, even so, huge waste is still the order of the day.
I'd personally agree. But this sounds like the kind of thing that, at many companies, could be a real challenge.
Ultimately, you can measure dollars spent on CI workers. It's much harder and less direct to quantify the cost of not having them (until, for instance, people start taking shortcuts with testing and a regression escapes to production).
That kind of asymmetry tends, unless somebody has a strong overriding vision of where the value really comes from, to result in penny pinching on the wrong things.