[gjsman-1000]

“conservatively $435,000,000 per year”

But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it?

Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings.

EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense even though I do not believe, even for a second, this actually costs Kroger $435M a year.

[jerf]

Vastly, vastly less than that. Even as expensive as engineers are.

And "zero" mistakes is not part of the goal. It clearly wasn't in the requirements during initial development, why would they add it afterwards?

[gjsman-1000]

Because, if there is even one mistake; the profit losses from that mistake, could easily eat up the savings.

Imagine having to tell management your optimization to save $400K cost $100K in engineer time and caused a $700K outage where the “Add to cart” button sometimes didn’t work. Great job. You’re possibly fired.

(Edit: Due to my misreading, add a few digits to the outage cost.)

[jerf]

That's not how you do risk analysis. You're proving too much [1]; you're proving that no company should ever change any working system because something could go wrong.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

[gjsman-1000]

I don’t care if you can justify it in an academic sense; your company’s boardroom is going to say:

- Savings $400K

- Direct expenditures $100K

- Mistake expenditures $700K

- Net loss $400K; immediate loss $800K

And that’s it. You’re fired, replaced with someone who is better at not fixing things that ain’t broken; who wouldn’t have made this mistake in the first place. And heaven help you if your code is deployed before the Nintendo Switch 2 launch (or another major launch) when you made this mistake; or if you just ruined another company’s launch and your company’s contract with them to support it. Pointing to a Wikipedia article, musing about how risk analysis should be done, isn’t going to save your skin.

[bluGill]

If mistakes cost that much you need something in place to prevent them anyway. Because I guarantee that eventually you will need some change made (tax laws change?) and you then get that same risk.

[ozgrakkurt]

Bean counter logic example A.

The articles fault is trying to appeal to this logic at all.

Reality is you don’t know how to estimate this, I don’t know either and I doubt anyone really knows.

This kind of logic is used to push things in the direction that the person wants, it really doesn’t seem genuine

[gwd]

> I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K

Would you do it to save 1000x that much? Because you're missing 3 zeroes.

[gjsman-1000]

That would make a lot more sense (pardon my misreading)…

… but at the same time, I don’t believe for a second this actually causes a $435M loss. There are way too many assumptions - for example, if people are ordering groceries, they are way more tolerant of delays for needs than, say, the latest TV deal.

The loss that it causes on conversion rate for a brand new company trying to get leads does not track with buying oatmeal.

[StopVibeCoding]

for a company the size of kroger, $435M is an extremely conservative loss. If someone did proper research and determined that it's 3x, maybe 4x that much I would belive them.