How to be a leader when the vibes are off

> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.

There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why.

The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.

The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are in the six or even seven figure range.

How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?

I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to square one and try again.

I'm going through this right now where all expectations have been reversed after an acquisition. Ex: I'm not big on metrics, I rather have direct communication with my team to understand issues we are facing and any challenge an individual is struggling with. Looking at metrics hardly tells you the full story. Well, after the acquisition, metrics are in! story points, number of comments on PR, number of PRs, etc.

I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying this is the way forward, deal with it.

Edit: Coincidentally one of my blog posts is on the front page right now and addresses similar issues -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359604

I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter "law".

A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.

Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.

It will through increasing unemployment rate