I was hired on to a company in midtown looking to build out an HPC environment for analytics. I live pretty low in the stack, so my time was spent head down bui

I was hired on to a company in midtown looking to build out an HPC environment for analytics. I live pretty low in the stack, so my time was spent head down building a system with filesystem and network performance to the lead dev's spec. The CEO had experienced a major exit in dotcom v1, and was funding the new venture himself. Lead dev was one of CEO's generals from the bubble win. Money was basically unlimited. This meant we were building a hoss of a system with a latest-gen infiniband fabric, the most ram per-core Intel could give us, and some really high end IB connected storage. The lead dev's requirements kept getting heavier and heavier despite blowing gobs on leading edge hardware. Eventually we had an all-hands meeting where someone in sales did a mockup of our product in Excel. They went to a customer in our target demo and loaded up the full dataset in Excel, and got the answers the customer was looking for. Sales had successfully implemented the product our customers wanted with no absurd HPC systems, but only Excel and a MacBook Pro. I was reaching out to prospects before my first beer made it to me at the bar that night.