> a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, There are several problems with this line o

> a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, There are several problems with this line of thinking, although as I will mention, it's not actually crazy, just problematic. Attribution is one, how will you know if the team actually did do something that increased profits? There are many teams are involved in a business. It's not at all simple to say he-did-this-and-she-did-that. In fact much of office politics is exactly that, pie-cutting. You also don't know whether a non-specialist might have figured out the problem. There's a lot of smart people at Twitter, right? Surely some of them work in adjacent areas and have occasional time to look at other things? If a non-specialist might have solved it, what else might he have solved? Couldn't he also collect 0.5% slices of profit for the company? How do big businesses ever lose money? They must have a load of specialists, right? And some of those will during any period be doing that thing that makes them pay for themselves in perpetuity? The big danger is you justify every expenditure this way, "they just need to find one thing". Security says they stopped a cyberattack that would have shut down the company for two days, kernel says they reduced runtime by 0.5%, sales claims to have raised prices by 0.5%. In the end there's a fair chance that all the claimed gains don't add up to your bottom line. I remember as a quant trader we could buy any book we wanted. Programming, Linear Algebra, finance, whatever. "If you find just one good idea, that will pay for all the books." Hard to argue with considering the sums involved, but it's also hard to know exactly what ideas we got out of the books. Finally, if someone claims to be making you money, they will also claim the money. Especially if it's clearly agreed (Yep AWS cost is lower by 0.5% exclusively because of a kernel team action). So them saving 0.5% won't necessarily mean the company gets that extra profit. They may feel they deserve a raise, or new headcount to spread the work. Or you will decide not to pay them and they will leave.