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If you have a large number of users, accounting is involved in virtually everything you do in the capacity of serving them. Engineering history is littered with

If you have a large number of users, accounting is involved in virtually everything you do in the capacity of serving them. Engineering history is littered with projects to shave milliseconds or cents off a very small component which is used extremely frequently.

capableweb 5y ago
> If you have a large number of users, accounting is involved in virtually everything you do in the capacity of serving them What do you count as "large number of users"? Worked on projects with millions of users, thousands of requests per second and when we refactored based on increasing throughoutput/decreasing latency we had exactly 0 accountants involved, even if the company had accountants in-house and full-time. I think it depends more on the company size than the number of users you have. > Engineering history is littered with projects to shave milliseconds or cents off a very small component which is used extremely frequently. Yup, agree and been there myself, hence my comments about staying away from Lambda and VPS for this kind of focus and go for dedicated instances where this matter.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  > Worked on projects with millions of users Maybe interacting with the finance department was above your pay grade. The bigger the operation, the more costs matter. That's a thumb-rule you can find anywhere.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > Maybe interacting with the finance department was above your pay grade. It was not, we were a nimble and lightweight team with everyone doing everything they could possibly do. I had insight into accounting and helped them with implementing some stuff and some of the designers helped with frontend as some of them knew HTML and CSS and so on. > The bigger the operation, the more costs matter. That's a thumb-rule you can find anywhere. Yeah... I think I agree? "The bigger the operation" is referring to the employees working for the company, not the number of users right? If so, that was exactly my point. It's about the number of employees that dictate if accountants gets involved or not, not the number of users.
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      Being the SME on accounting for your team is not even a little bit comparable to working with the department with accountability to the company's cash flow. I don't know why you have tried that angle. It is a significant category error.
- rualca 5y ago
  > (...) we had exactly 0 accountants involved, You should really rephrase that as "I was totally unaware that there were accountants involved" because it is simply inconceivable that a business activity involving allocating resources and changing operational needs would not be tracked. Either you are grossly misrepresenting your personal anecdote or you are filling in quite a few blindspots.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Yeah, it's completely impossible we both have two different experiences, I'm either lying or missing something, because every engineering-team waits for accountants before they do performance optimizations or capacity planning. Whatever happened to "Assume good faith"?

capableweb 5y ago

> If you have a large number of users, accounting is involved in virtually everything you do in the capacity of serving them What do you count as "large number of users"? Worked on projects with millions of users, thousands of requests per second and when we refactored based on increasing throughoutput/decreasing latency we had exactly 0 accountants involved, even if the company had accountants in-house and full-time. I think it depends more on the company size than the number of users you have. > Engineering history is littered with projects to shave milliseconds or cents off a very small component which is used extremely frequently. Yup, agree and been there myself, hence my comments about staying away from Lambda and VPS for this kind of focus and go for dedicated instances where this matter.

spacemanmatt 5y ago
> Worked on projects with millions of users Maybe interacting with the finance department was above your pay grade. The bigger the operation, the more costs matter. That's a thumb-rule you can find anywhere.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Maybe interacting with the finance department was above your pay grade. It was not, we were a nimble and lightweight team with everyone doing everything they could possibly do. I had insight into accounting and helped them with implementing some stuff and some of the designers helped with frontend as some of them knew HTML and CSS and so on. > The bigger the operation, the more costs matter. That's a thumb-rule you can find anywhere. Yeah... I think I agree? "The bigger the operation" is referring to the employees working for the company, not the number of users right? If so, that was exactly my point. It's about the number of employees that dictate if accountants gets involved or not, not the number of users.
  - spacemanmatt 5y ago
    Being the SME on accounting for your team is not even a little bit comparable to working with the department with accountability to the company's cash flow. I don't know why you have tried that angle. It is a significant category error.
rualca 5y ago
> (...) we had exactly 0 accountants involved, You should really rephrase that as "I was totally unaware that there were accountants involved" because it is simply inconceivable that a business activity involving allocating resources and changing operational needs would not be tracked. Either you are grossly misrepresenting your personal anecdote or you are filling in quite a few blindspots.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Yeah, it's completely impossible we both have two different experiences, I'm either lying or missing something, because every engineering-team waits for accountants before they do performance optimizations or capacity planning. Whatever happened to "Assume good faith"?