Cloud
Post #5092 · source on Telegram
Refusing senior dev salaries, happily footing the outrageous monthly cloud vendor bills
Description
Two-panel SpongeBob meme with a vertical divider: on the left of each panel is SpongeBob SquarePants. In the top panel he stands half-lidded and unimpressed; on the right the caption reads, "Paying more for experienced programmers, designers and architects that would write an efficient app." In the bottom panel SpongeBob leans forward wide-eyed and eager (partially blurred in this version), while the right-hand caption says, "Paying insane amount for cloud vendors." The joke highlights how some companies balk at higher payroll for senior engineers who could optimize code, yet freely overspend on cloud infrastructure. For seasoned devs, it skewers real‐world trade-offs between up-front engineering quality and runaway cloud bills
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17Comment deleted
Corporate cost strategy: deny a 30% raise to the engineer who can delete the N+1 query, green-light a 300% spike in egress fees, then wonder why ‘kubectl get runway -n finance’ returns 0 days
The same company that won't approve a $20k raise for a senior architect who could cut cloud costs by 40% just auto-renewed their $2M/year Kubernetes cluster that's running at 15% utilization because 'we might need the capacity someday.'
The real cloud cost optimization strategy nobody talks about: hiring senior engineers who actually understand what 'pay for what you use' means before spinning up that auto-scaling group with no upper limit. But sure, let's negotiate another $5k off that Staff Engineer's offer while our Lambda cold starts rack up more egress charges than their entire annual salary
Why hire a principal to kill the N+1 and fix cache locality when you can autoscale 200 c7g.16xlarge and call it OpEx - FinOps will optimize it next quarter
Cloud economics 101: Pay senior architects once; pay vendors forever for the 'scalable' bloat they enable
Skip the principal who’d kill the N+1; buy more nodes and pay the egress - don’t worry, Finance calls it elastic OPEX
I mean, 1k per month sounds like a lot until you remember that humans are expensive as Fuck and that's the salary of one mid-range programmer. Comment deleted
isn't 1k/month in Austria is barely enough to survive? Comment deleted
no? I think 500/month is the bare minimum, depends on where you live and if you inherited a house or not though Comment deleted
thing is we don't really have a minimum wage system because our unions are so strong that we don't need it. How much money you need depends mostly on your preferred standard of living. With 500/mo. you're certainly not going to be homeless, but it's not going to be the ritz either Comment deleted
But in the long term though... It seems to me that scaling the team up in both quality and quantity to write an efficient, maintainable app and then scale it back down would be more beneficial than constantly paying for the managed clouds 🤔 Comment deleted
I guess it depends on the type of software Comment deleted
Depends on what you do. Currently a lot of companies move from cloud only to hybrid and with edge computing we also start to slowly move some of calculations to the client side Comment deleted
Well I guess that qualifies for "efficient app", because there's definitely no need to compute everything in the managed clouds Comment deleted
1k to run a To-do app Comment deleted
Insane amount is not 1k. Usually you start to reconsider if you pay more for cloud month then you would pay for 1 programmer per year. Comment deleted
Compare 1k/month for years vs 10k/month for 6 months. If you don't expect any success: you will pick first option. Comment deleted