I do data engineering, and I'm working on carving out a niche for myself in optimizing code. Whereas most others want to solve sexy problems as soon as possible

I do data engineering, and I'm working on carving out a niche for myself in optimizing code. Whereas most others want to solve sexy problems as soon as possible, it ends up biting us in the end because it doesn't scale down the road and/or costs tremendous amounts of money. Our OKRs often include "reduce cost of X by 8%", which is nice but isn't achieved half the time. But if you have deep experience or are thinking outside the box, you can (as I have) reduce by 95%.