Comment by hedora

Also, instead of having a small team of people to fight scalable infrastructure configuration, you could put 1-2 full time engineers on performance engineering. They'd find big-O and constant factor problems way before they mattered in production.

Of course, those people's weekly status reports would always be "we spent all week tracking down a dumb mistake, wrote one line of code and solved a scaling problem we'd hit at 100x our current scale".

That's equivalent to waving a "fire me" flag at the bean counters and any borderline engineering managers.