[genewitch]

Seeing Hulu at equinix, as well as PlayStation Network, in large cages, and then our two small cages was rather eye opening. Some people have a lot of money to throw at a problem, others have smart money to throw at smart engineers.

[kristjansson]

Someone that worked at one of the former sort of organizations once described it to me as having a 'money hammer'. The money hammer is the solution to all problems.

Sometimes, for some organizations, spending 0.1 or 5 or 10 million dollars to solve a problem for now, right now is the smart and prudent choice.

[gsnedders]

I mean, there's gotta be some question about costs of hardware (plus colocation costs, etc.) versus the costs of engineers to optimise the stack.

I don't doubt there's a point at which it's cheaper to focus on reducing hardware and colocation costs, but for the vast majority engineers are the expensive thing.

[roguas]

This is only due to the fact that there is a good chance an engineer on github is already working on your problems and you just wait to integrate his work.

Companies that think engineers are expensive will continue to buy tons of hardware and scale rather badly. If you are not actively pushing the ceiling you gonna fall out. You should work on problems cause, who knows, it seems like there might be some value.