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But why? Their revenue is growing faster and they aren’t running out of money.
by ec109685 8y ago
But why? Their revenue is growing faster and they aren’t running out of money.
- smolder 8y agoAt that scale, I suspect there are some ~$10k engineering-time efforts that could save them $1m a year in costs, if they already have the people on staff with the expertise. In my limited experience, a lot of opportunities like that get missed because: - an optimization is considered lower priority than feature work and bugs, so never gets staffed - it's considered risky even when it's not - it's difficult to quantify the value until the works done Aside from that, just because it may be more cost effective to use 1000 servers and 1 developer versus 200 servers and 3 developers, doesn't mean it's a sound choice. One invests in people using their brains, the other mostly disappears into raw material supply chains, building servers and infrastructure and burning fuel to run them.
- marcosdumay 8y agoHead count is not infinite. I don't agree with the GP's claim that they aren't running out of money (if they don't show a profit, they are running out of money, by definition), but developer time is a limited resource that must be carefully allocated. They have a very hard problem on their hands of estimating the revenue growth new features will bring, and compare them to costs savings from better code. I don't think anybody here has enough data to decide on this - it's not impossible that nobody there has enough data either.
- smolder 8y agoI just wanted to say I fully agree with what you said; it's a very hard problem.
- tomstoms 8y agoAlso, buying cpu power is a lot easier than recruiting devs.