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by operatingthetan 1205 days ago
>That detour involved a team that was following a process I could not understand. Turns out they didn't understand it either. I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. It took me just a couple days. Chances are you swim in a sea of complacency too.

Hold on a sec, are you saying you found dead weight and then got leadership to terminate their employment?

4 comments

> Last year I was bored and I started to break down our cloud spend

I read it thinking they meant to their cloud platform bills.

But you bring up a good hypothetical regardless. This is why people are not necessarily overjoyed to have folks from other teams sniffing around... if they think you are looking for "inefficiencies" all the more so. Getting laid off isn't the only threat, making their job a lot harder/more unpleasant is also one. Or just being blamed for being bad at their jobs.

To the organizations bottom line, and perhaps to your bosses, it's all the same either way. Hey, you saved money. To your co-workers, obviously not.

You've got to build up trust, that you're looking to make their job more pleasant, not more unpleasant, or non-existent.

It sounded to me more like they figured out a more efficient way to do their "process" that was a whole lot cheaper.
It's not clear, and I read it that way at first, too. But the op was looking at cloud computing costs so I'd bet that he just reduced cloud costs.

It seems like a bit of a stretch that he got anyone fired, but much more likely that they just scaled back on cloud services for that particular project.

I don't think that's what he was saying, but if he was, are you suggesting there's a problem with that?
If that's the case then the people who told them to "stay in their lane" had a legitimate reason to be defensive. Was it better for the business? Who knows since we are only getting one side of the story from someone patting themselves on the back.

But yes, I would say behaving like an interloper in your org and getting people fired because you deviate from your actual job is highly problematic. After the news gets out about that behavior you can better believe they are going to get stonewalled in their actual role.