On your points 1 and 2, absolutely I recognize those problems. The second appears to be a user education or non-bounded task problem (can't you just have the cl

On your points 1 and 2, absolutely I recognize those problems. The second appears to be a user education or non-bounded task problem (can't you just have the cloud shutdown VMs that aren't accessed for a specified time period?). I do like the concept of disposable infrastructure, but it is a tool like seven-league boots that one must think very carefully while using. Addressing the first point, well, that's almost getting into business level ROI calculations, which at least on an individual developer level might be reasonably approximated by things like "is it worth the time?"[0], but that's never been a perfectly answerable easy question; for one thing, you might need to consider that the time spent is learning that will pay off in the future. I like to think of it as "technical investing" as opposed to technical debt. As for three, that's a big problem, no matter the scale or project. I do not have the benefit of your experience with software in the large (thank you for your stories!), but even on a smaller project I'm working on recently I run into this problem: we have git repos. We have documentation in the repos. But to get to that documentation, you have to know how to get to the repos, and where do you document that? I tried imagining automating things completely, and the answer I came to was ultimately I'd have to build an AI to on-board new developers to the project. Not ideal. And like you said, the scaffolding surrounding projects is frustrating too. Again, same project, but this time I'm digging into the build system. Turns out it was converted to make from the previous build system that appeared to be mostly shell scripts, yet the shell scripts are still around, unused, but like little land mines, waiting for someone to tinker with them and waste a bunch of time. [0] - https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_worth_the_time.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_worth_the_time.png