4 ms·

I've had that thought too, but I'm playing a tactical game rather than a strategic one at this point. The name of the game is to survive the next few quarters.

• lumost 4y ago
  The snake eats its own tail? This is why layoffs are imprecise, everyone starts pointing fingers. If the cloud cost reduction team only ever increased costs for 2-3 years... then there is a leadership problem for letting it continue. Otherwise the cloud cost reduction team probably was doing something else for leadership.
  • ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Not pointing fingers (it's not my money they're spending keeping the other team in business), just saying that if the logic is "actually, our cloud spend looks better than ever, maybe we can lay off the people whose job it is to do that?" then they are not looking at me because I have a different title. My big saves are all in the category of "I was in there anyway and noticed that X was enabled. Do we need that on?" so I look like a thoughtful engineer who is alert for waste. Anyway all of this is a bit of a joke obviously. I know that layoff decisions aren't going to be made based on looking at individual people, or even teams. Still, it can't really hurt me to save my employer money (as long as it isn't my own salary, or my colleagues' salary), especially in a tough macro environment. Perhaps I'm even saving some significant amount of emissions and therefore marginally delaying the end of all human life, or marginally reducing demand for energy at a time when it's tight. Thousands of engineers doing the same all at once can probably significantly hurt the hyperscalers' business though.