If your hosting costs are not significant (e.g. you're not a youtube, netflix kind of company where hosting costs eat up a lot of your profits) I think you should optimize for developer productivity instead of computing efficiency. Does it really matter if you spend 20k on hosting instead of 10k if you have to pay your devs 10x that? Just my opinion, curious to hear what other people think
Reducing costs was not the priority during my time there. Fintech startups had a runway that could loop the equator several times - a stark contrast to cash-strapped startups where I did contracts at. It was a real eye opener! It was always a race to get the products out, regardless of cost.
Reminds me of the very first time I went to work for a trading firm. We had been having some performance issues with a particular software system, and so I told the CTO “After looking at all this, if you give us a month I’m pretty sure we can improve performance by about 30%.” He looks at me and then says “Or how about I just get you guys twenty more machines? I can have them here in a couple of days.”
