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lpapez • 10/01/2024 • 2 replies • view on HN

Maybe these optimizations benefit the two users who do the operation three times a year.

In such an extreme case no amount of optimization work would be profitable.

So the parent comment asks a very valid question: how much total time was saved by this and who asked for it to be saved (paying or free tier customers for example)?

People who see the business side of things rightfully fear when they hear the word "optimization", it's often not the best use of limited development resources - especially in an early stage product under development.

Replies

sroussey • 10/01/2024

I do wish that when people write about optimization that they would then multiply by usage, or something similar.

Another way is to show CPU usage over a fleet of servers before and after. And then reshuffle the servers and use fewer and use the number of servers no longer needed as the metric.

Number of servers have direct costs, as well as indirect costs, so you can even derive a dollar value. More so if you have a growth rate.

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godelski • 10/01/2024

  > So the parent comment asks a very valid question: how much total time was saved by this and who asked for it to be saved (paying or free tier customers for example)?
That is a hard question to answer because it very much depends on the use case, which is why I gave a vague response in my comment. Truth be told, __there is no answer__ BECAUSE it depends on context. In the case of AI agents, yeah, 50% is going to save you a ton of money. If you make LLM calls once a day, then no, probably not. Part of being the developer is to determine this tradeoff. Specifically, that's what technical managers are for, communicating technical stuff to business people (sure, your technical manager might not be technical, but someone being bad at their job doesn't make the point irrelevant, it just means someone else needs to do the job).

You're right about early stage products, but there's lots of moderate and large businesses (and yes, startups) that don't optimize but should. Most software never optimizes and it has led to a lot of enshitification. Yes, move fast and break things, but go back and clean up, optimize, and reduce your tech debt, because you left a mess of broken stuff in your wake. But it is weird to pigeonhole to early stage startups.