[zozbot234]

> almost 30k$/mo

That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.

[tluyben2]

Sure, but my point was that they cut that bill with 20k PER month by giving me 5k one off... They gave me 10k runway to poke around but 5k was enough to fix it; it was simply that bad to start with. The low hanging fruit in most systems I see is really trivial to fix; they just have no one to do it... I bet other people here have seen that before when thrown into an existing project (and I read Spolsky at an impressionable point in my career so I am usually the one against rewriting the whole thing outright).

[baron816]

What you’re saying is that there were a handful of bottlenecks that you caught immediately or were found with some simple profiling, right? Not that they made the mistake of writing their app in Python instead of assembly, as the article seems to imply is now necessary.

[tluyben2]

> there were a handful of bottlenecks that you caught immediately

Exactly. I was responding mostly to the point that most CTO's/management belief that you should just let hardware handle it while programmers should just deliver fast as they can. He says it is always a balance; you cannot pay for optimized assembly when writing a crud application, but I claim we completely swung to the other side of the spectrum. For instance, a financial company I did work for had no database indices besides the primary key and left AWS to scale that for them. And then we are not even talking about Mongo (this was MySQL); Mongo is completely abused as it is famous for 'scaling' and 'no effort setup', so a lot of people don't think about performance or structure at all in any way; people just dump data in it and query it in diabolical ways. They just trust the software/hardware to fix that for them. I recently tried to migrate a large one to MySQL, but it is pure hell because of it's dynamic nature; complete structured changed over time while the data from all the past is still in there; fields appeared, changed content type etc and nothing is structured or documented. With 100s of gbs of that and not sure if things are actually correctly imported, I gave up. They are still paying through the nose; I fixed some indexing in their setup (I am by no means a Mongo expert but some things are universal when you think about data structures, performance and data management) which made some difference, but MySQL or Postgresql would've saved them a lot of money in my opinion. Ah well; at least the development of the system was cheap...

[grogenaut]

But if they hired you at the beginning you wouldn't have been able to save this much money that would actually justify your salary. I think they made the right decision depending on the amount of time they were burning the cash.

[johnny22]

seems like you deserve more of a cut than that.

[tluyben2]

Well, the premise going in after a quick (very quick) review of the system was: 'I will check what I can do in 5 days at $10k; I believe I can help, but if I cannot, you lose $10k. If I can help you in less time, you only pay that time.'. I do not think I can move that to some other deal with that premise. Maybe if I say; 'I will do this for 50% of the money you save in 12 months after I am done' that would work, but this is is a side thing which I do because I like optimizing things; if I sell it in another way, it's not bound to time which will make it a timesink and risk. It is a choice.

[pdimitar]

I am curious how do you even find a side job like that.

I am definitely a spiritual brother with you because I love optimising things. But I am very unsure how do I even start a side career with that premise.

Any advice?

[tluyben2]

> Any advice?

Spend a lot of time with funded startups. Meetups, conferences etc. They will be happy to talk about this. But also online; you need to 'dox' nicks some times, but when you see quite broad questions in slack/reddit about performance of systems and you find out this is some (tech) (co-)founder you can ask them to help. I do no-cure-no-pay if the system is an MVP and crud; I do no-cure-still-pay if the system is larger and already live. That is not because I want to blackmail the company (and if I like the idea you can give me a % as well instead, all fun and games), but usually because 'wanting to help' is punished when it's 'free' as in no good deed will go unpunished. I Did no-cure-no-pay with optimising (and other services) live systems in the past, but as soon as I touch it, people blame me for all kinds of dataloss (while i'm very careful and absolutely make (offsite) backups always) and other misery. So when basically what I do is connect with (co)founders who are in a jam and when they don't have production data yet, I will go no-cure-no-pay; when they have production data they need to keep, I will explore but if I cannot do anything (for that price, mind you; there is always something to do), I still get paid.

There are probably literally 1m projects and growing at any time in this world that have serious issues and that are burning money and that will crash (all the time or sooner or later) that need help. For instance, I know of a large state own postal/courier tracking system that crashes under load every 48 hours. We tried to help them but they are fine just rebooting (manually!). Fine, that happens too.