[xondono]

Except you’re self selecting for a company that has high engineering costs, big fat margins to accommodate expenses like additional hardware, and lots of projects for engineers to work on.

The evaluation needs to happen in the margins, even if it saves pennies/year on the dollar, it’s best to have those engineers doing that than have them idling.

The problem is that almost no one is doing it, because the way we make these decisions has nothing to do with the economical calculus behind, most people just do “what Google does”, which explains a lot of the disfunction.

[bjourne]

I think the parent's point is that if Google with millions of servers can't make performance optimization worthwhile, then it is very unlikely that a smaller company can. If salaries dominate over compute costs, then minimizing the latter at the expense of the former is counterproductive.

> The evaluation needs to happen in the margins, even if it saves pennies/year on the dollar, it’s best to have those engineers doing that than have them idling.

That's debatable. Performance optimization almost always lead to complexity increase. Doubled performance can easily cause quadrupled complexity. Then one has to consider whether the maintenance burden is worth the extra performance.

[makeitdouble]

> it is very unlikely that a smaller company can.

I think it's the reverse: a small company doesn't have the liquidity, buying power or ability to convert more resource into more money like Google.

And of course a lot of small companies will be paying Google with a fat margin to use their cloud.

Getting by with less resources, or even on-premise reduced hardware will be a way bigger win. That's why they'll pay a DBA full time to optimize their database needs to reduce costs 2 to 3x the salary. Or have full team of infra guys mostly dealing with SRE and performance.

[maccard]

> If salaries dominate over compute costs, then minimizing the latter at the expense of the former is counterproductive.

And with client side software, compute costs approach 0 (as the company isn’t paying for it).