Another example: Instead of paying writers, get an LLM to turn a paragraph of information into a long article that says the same thing thrice in different ways. Readers get annoyed and take a mental note of your website as being low effort drivel, but you save a bit of money!
Don't Be Frupid
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#22That is a reason I only buy latest MacBooks to my team.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#23I once had a project that moved a microservice into a monolith on a larger instance type. SRE flagged that larger instance type as expensive, at $1k/mo. They really drilled in, asking "are you sure? that's a very expensive instance size". Yes, I was sure. It was replacing a service that was costing $20k/mo across a number of tiny instances.
Now I have a strong belief that paying people whose only job is to save on costs is a bad move: they will conclude that the best way to save on costs is to shut down the company. Technically correct!
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#24I think the main problem is that measuring a lot of these things is incredibly hard. The post mentioned laptops and build time and it reminded me of a blog post[1] trying to figure out if it's worth upgrading to m3 macbooks. I encorage you to read the post yourself, but my impression is that the whole project was a huge waste of time. I suspect most attempts to measure impact will end this way. I also think a lot of the recomendations on fighting frupidity are seriously flawd. For example letting developers decide isn't any garentee that you've made the right choice, but it is a garentee that you've made an expensive one. Unless the developers are basically paying for their own tools like in a startup, this is definetly a way to piss away a companiese funds on developers that are more concerend with their own career than the profitibility of the company.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#25On board with all of this except conferences, which I still approve sometimes, but typically see poor yields here. My preference is to pay for 1:1 expert training.
Highest end dev laptops available. Dev replicas of prod infra. Separate high spec servers for almost everything. Highly automated deep testing pipelines. Enterprise grade Internet.
We also shared how to build 2x-10x faster github actions runners: https://words.strongcompute.com/p/maximising-github-actions-...
Dev time is precious.
Other focus is Management by Context: Solid physical and tech environment. Clear goals of next feature with real testing in front of users. Dive into details where something isn't working, otherwise hands off.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#26I once had a project that moved a microservice into a monolith on a larger instance type. SRE flagged that larger instance type as expensive, at $1k/mo. They really drilled in, asking "are you sure? that's a very expensive instance size". Yes, I was sure. It was replacing a service that was costing $20k/mo across a number of tiny instances. Now I have a strong belief that paying people whose only job is to save on co…
That's a perfect example of the type of thing I was trying to get across at in the article.
Cost optimization + a lack of systems thinking = frupidity.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#27On board with all of this except conferences, which I still approve sometimes, but typically see poor yields here. My preference is to pay for 1:1 expert training. Highest end dev laptops available. Dev replicas of prod infra. Separate high spec servers for almost everything. Highly automated deep testing pipelines. Enterprise grade Internet. We also shared how to build 2x-10x faster github actions runners: https://w…
> Highest end dev laptops available.
Waste of money. Give em an air.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#28> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…
> Conferences are expensive.
> AWS reinvent for example requires you to spend 2000 dollars on
That's an extreme example. There's thousands of other, more local, less expensive, less extravagant conferences. It's more for show than useful for the attendants, especially with the YouTube recordings. Anyone who can gain thousands or millions from new ideas in AWS also has TAMs ready to relay the interesting parts of reinvent during regular meetings.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#29Was nodding along until "...consolidating databases into a single underpowered behemoth...". Nothing worse than race conditions and stale data between multiple disparate datastores. I'd rather have one database and more ram for as long as possible, tyvm. Some of the latest nights I've had debugging were at companies with mission critical data spread across multiple databases. I know it's orthogonal to the point, but this one really didn't land with me.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#30> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…
" travel to Las Vegas"
Yep, that's a paid vacation for SF engineers.