So the cost of 3-4 FTEs at a company that employs >4000. Cool.
And how much does the change cost them in terms of:
- Not being able to hire talent when they need because they don't know or aren't willing to work with Elixir.
- Spending extra time training engineers.
- Having to hire more senior engineers/those versed in functional programming vs generalists.
- The rewrite itself (I'm sure it didn't happen magically overnight).
Unless the number had a few more zeros at the end of it, there's no scenario where this project made real business sense vs being some principal engineer's vanity project. $2M is what a company like Pinterest spends on an off-site or a random exec's spot bonus. There are probably analytics dashboards that no one looks at that cost >$2M/yr to produce.
It wasn't too long ago that engineers had to walk over hot coals to get their company to use Python. All of the things you're saying were applicable to Python when the company "only" had programmers who knew Java.
And how much does the change cost them in terms of:
- Not being able to hire talent when they need because they don't know or aren't willing to work with Elixir.
- Spending extra time training engineers.
- Having to hire more senior engineers/those versed in functional programming vs generalists.
- The rewrite itself (I'm sure it didn't happen magically overnight).
Unless the number had a few more zeros at the end of it, there's no scenario where this project made real business sense vs being some principal engineer's vanity project. $2M is what a company like Pinterest spends on an off-site or a random exec's spot bonus. There are probably analytics dashboards that no one looks at that cost >$2M/yr to produce.