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by jiggawatts 1295 days ago
> help our ... fleet scale better."

Heh, I tried that too! I found a lot of setups using old HDD disks that were at 100% of their IOPS limits and CPUs that were idle. When they were built, Azure didn't have Premium SSD, so that's forgivable. I offered to rearrange where the expenditure goes, such that they have newer and faster CPUs, Premium SSD, but fewer cores which means a reduction in licensing costs. Cost neutral while improving their performance and capacity.

That got a very firm "Nope! Nope! Nope!" from most (but not all) teams as well.

> As such middle management has to say "we need to do more with less", but they are promoted based on these numbers going up!

I came to the same conclusion. Many project managers or product owners introduced themselves in the first meeting by proudly proclaiming the huge size of their operation. I.e.: "The system I'm responsible for is a multi-million dollar project with a small army of developers!"

I've also noticed that there's a tendency to exponentially blow out complexity of what ought to be a trivial system for the same reason. Something that could be static HTML on an S3 bucket or Azure Storage Account turns into a microservices monstrosity draped across three clouds and four external SaaS services.

Those resumes don't pad themselves.

1 comments

It’s as though they interpreted David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs as a managerial playbook