| > The ratio of revenue per each small customer vs the total cost of integration (and very likely on-going maintenance) was probably at least an amber flag somewhere for those who had visibility of it. At the last company I worked at (won't call them a startup, just a 10-year old small business that somehow kept raising funding but has never made a profit) I was astonished to learn from a new CPO that in our tenth year we didn't know if we were making money from a customer. We had no idea how individual customers used the application, which was very data intensive, or what that was costing us. The information was there, but no-one ever looked. Every sale was considered a success, even if it turned out to cost us 3x in data costs and customer support. Often customer support alone would make a sale into a loss. We spent a relatively large portion of our revenue running very expensive servers to respond instantly to searches that no-one ever performed. I created detailed monitoring to show this. I talked about them to everyone, including Product and the CEO. No-one disputed those facts. But instead we had several people essentially dedicated to downsizing application servers and deleting unused S3 buckets, trimming three zeros a month when we could have trimmed five. I have learned not to assume that warnings are visible, that people pay attention to them if they are visible, or that anyone cares. They're still circling the drain, still raising money (somehow!) and I doubt anything's changed. |
The last 7 years of my life as an SRE. It's maddening.