Comment by deckar01
21 hours ago
You aren’t accounting for managerial politics. A product manager won’t gamble on a large project to lower operating cost, when their bonus is based on customer acquisition metrics.
21 hours ago
You aren’t accounting for managerial politics. A product manager won’t gamble on a large project to lower operating cost, when their bonus is based on customer acquisition metrics.
The original author said he built this on the weekend, so my assumption is that this was something engineers had advocated for before but were shut down because management wanted them elsewhere.
The use of ai agents allowed them to shrink the problem down to the point where it was small enough to fit in their free time and not interrupt their assigned work.
Why are engineers spending their week-end on saving their company money especially if the company clearly doesn't care to allocate resources to the problem?
I get that it's fun and there's personal satisfaction in it, but it just reinforces to management that they don't need to care about allocating resources to optimisation, the problem will just take care of itself for free.
At some point it's hard not to care about the work you do everyday. And if you care, then you are going to find yourself donating a Saturday here or there to solving big DevEx papercuts that you can't convince management to care about.
Should it be this way? No. Is it this way in practice? Unfortunately often.
A cynical take is that this makes them more hireable, so they can more easily get to a better company with not-so-brain-dead management
This also explains this blog post
A bit sarcastic, but still too close to reality for comfort:
For the managers, it's about a bonus. For engineers it's the existential question of future hirability: every future employer will love the candidate with experience in operating a $500k/a cluster. They guy who wrote a library that got linked into a service... Yeah, that's the kind they already have, not interested, move along.
The engineer who identified 500k in savings is a great candidate I'd say. But solving a problem requires a problem to be there in the first place.