Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

$6m in annual cost savings is truly unremarkable, if we are to believe levels.fyi [0] [1]

If you're truly paying engineers, project managers, etc $500k a head, it dramatically undermines the financial cost savings.

It very well might be the case that "We spent $25m of engineering resources to save $6m annually".

[0] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/uber/salaries/software-engi...

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/uber/salaries/software-engi...

View on HN

Bitter story time:

I made a config change to our AWS instances and projected approximately $10MM/year in AWS costs savings (pre-savings).

My boss asked me "Who told you to do this? We need to focus on $project instead". I found another team and transferred out. 3 months later there was a big fire drill about AWS costs and they took my 1-pager and executed it. Didn't get any credit in the shipped email nor did the manager reach out to apologize.

The organization still got the end result, though (to play devil's advocate). That sounds like a win for the company. They got the cost savings, plus they redirected attention back to a project that was higher priority than saving $10m 3 months earlier than they could have.

It may be a win for the company in some categories, but a loss in others.

Of course you didn't. You used your time to promote yourself instead of doing what you were asked to do instead. That could have cost a promotion for your manager who could have promoted you.

I don’t know you are downvoted. Aligning the personal interest vector with the companies interest vector is a huge problem that is usually underrepresented in NH comments.

Usually we only complain about the short sighting of the CEOs that prioritize short term stock gains over long term prosperity, but that also is just a specialized case of the success vector misalignment

This is a poor way to view salaried work.

If OP is meeting deliverables and did this on the side, this is a great example of a story that would make me inclined to hire.

The problem is OP didn't meet deliverables and the team was behind schedule.

Helpful in the right light, but equally not helpful in another.

“Team behind schedule” usually means that some manager promised an arbitrary date based on an imaginary timeline.

Every team needs slack. Bad managers hate slack. Good managers hide slack.

I think maybe my point was misunderstood.

I was trying to say that the employee tried to do what’s good for the company. However that backfired as his personal, and his manager’s, success vector are not aligned with the company’s. Hence although he did something that benefited the company it hurt his and his manager’s performance (exactly because they are not aligned with that of the company’s).

Hope it clears things up.

We were migrating to Kubernetes from fixed hosts and had to buy the capacity. I just spent a day looking at our utilization and made a better decision about what instance type to use.

Sounds like a fantastic way to maneuver and get credit for someone else's proactive engenuity

$25m spend to save $6m annually is a return on investment of 4 (and a bit) years to break even, then it's positive afterwards. So as long as the project runs for more than 4 years, they'd be ahead.

The only problem is that the database code might need maintenance, specs change or situations change, and the cost is _not_ 25m, but way more per year than anticipated. So much so that after a few years, a new batch of engineers start eyeing writing a new database system to purportedly save money...

Right, but that's $25m in R&D investment. Much better than $6m in cost of good/services delivered! Former is great innovation and will be ignored by investors because it's just a fixed cost on the way to becoming profitable. The latter is going to appear in the marginal cost of services calculation.

> we spent $25m of engineering resources to save $6m annually

This is a huge ROI. Borrowing $25m costs about $1.25m/yr so you're winning even with no upfront costs

I mean, ideally you are still employing those people into the future. Plus was there other opportunities to drive value that would've been better spent?

Ideally for the people, but not a requirement. I doubt they won't be conducting more layoffs either.

That math assumes the on-going maintenance of LedgerStore is no higher than that of using DynamoDB was.

I suspect there's now a team of technologists maintaining, securing, and operating LedgerStore.

I suspect they already had a team maintaining/debugging/operating dynamodb

Hosted services doesn't reduce maintenance costs to zero

They have teams maintaining/debugging/operating their use/consumption of dynamodb; they don't have teams maintaining/debugging/operating/securing dynamodb itself.

With LedgerDB, they now have to do both.

Optimizing to address high percentile issues (latency/error/correctness) on someone else’s code follows a bimodal pattern: it’s easy until it is impossible. Doing it on your own code is progressively more difficult and the complexity may cause you to give up, but you normally don’t hit the same wall.

Question is: Where else could they have spent those $25m? Could they have built something with more value?

Opportunity cost is a cost, too

if at uber's scale they still have enough opportunities of that scale for every one of their thousands of engineers i need to buy some of their stock

That’s what I was thinking and fully loaded cost at least 35% more than their salary.

Imagine trading 5 headcount full-time to manage the 1T+ fully custom database on an ongoing basis when they could have just used DynamoDB and have been done with it.

Or better, having to engineer a new feature that already existed in DynamoDB and just losing money at that point.

Of course now we are assuming that the existing solution didn’t also require engineering salaries to maintain.

Yes but since revenue is growing at over 70% due to squeezing out the drivers, there's more money to spend on fighting Amazon over the DynamoDB contract https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2023/01/16/ubers-new...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com