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Yeah, when I was there I saw plenty of <1% optimizations saving REDACTED gobs of money, and people were rewarded for it. I don't think it's applicable to most teams though.

Imagine a foo/bar/widget app that only serves 20B people (obvious exaggeration to illustrate the point) and is only necessary up to a few hundred times per day. You can handle that sort of traffic on a laptop on my home router and still have enough hootzpah left to stream netflix. I mean, you are Google, and you need to do something better than that [0], but the hardware for your project is going to be negligible compared to other concerns unless you're doing FHE or video transcoding or something extraordinarily expensive.

Walk that backward to, how many teams have 20B users or are doing extraordinarily expensive things? I don't have any clue, but when you look at public examples of cheap things that never got much traction and probably had a suite of engineers [1], I'd imagine it's not everyone in any case. You're probably mostly looking at people with enough seniority to be able to choose to work on core code affecting most services.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

Google seems to have problem of "you won't get promotion/raise if you don't work on something new" so they are not interested by services that just work and provide tidy little constant revenue

To some extent it's true on a macro scale, but it's a trope to say this is exclusively the case. I would say it is easier to paint the picture for promotion by working on new things but not by a large amount. The vast majority of folks at Google work on maintenance, as would be expected.

> Found a smoother way to sort numbers that reduced the "whirrrrrr" noise our disks made. It turns out this reduces disk failure rates by 1%, arrested nanoscale structural damage to the buildings our servers are in, allowed a reduction in necessary PPE, elongaded depreciation offsets and other things -- this one line of code has saved Google a billion dollars

Hah! I mean, if you can truly prove a business benefit by improving performance, I’m sure that you’d have a good shot at a promotion. Thing is it’s actually quite difficult to do so, and in the likely chance you cannot it just looks like you squandered a bunch of time for no reason.

Metrics are religiously collected and any sizable performance improvement will have a clear impact on one metric or another no?

Pay increases and promotions are for the most part a little more formulaic and upper-bounded than what you describe, but generally speaking if you can prove you saved the company $XM you will be rewarded (from firsthand experience, this is also true at Meta).

"Promotion? You must be joking. Your little stunt caused a revenue spike that pushed us over the threshold in $country, prompting $regulatory-agency to look into starting antitrust proceedings. Mitigating this will require an army of lawyers, that will cost approximately a third of the $1B you 'saved' us. Additionally, we will now have to create another throwaway chat app, for which we'll allocate another third of a billion in the budget. The final third... will go to executive bonuses, obviously.

You are hereby placed on a Performance Improvement Plan, starting tomorrow. On the off chance you'll come out of the other end still employed, keep in mind that your manager isn't being stupid by forbidding such 'optimizations', they're just following orders."

They likely have become one of the 10k getting fired for "underperforming". Company management in basically all businesses don't like know it alls that do the opposite of what they are told regardless of the outcome.

Google's core services wouldn't work so reliably if they didn't value optimization and engineering. I don't work there, but I'm pretty sure that the SREs and the developers behind Search and Maps don't get fired based on how many products they launched.

Is there a valid source for this number? All the articles I see seem to quote each other.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

[former Googler]

Yes, I occasionally saw people get highlighted for making optimizations like "this saves 1% in [some important service]". When you're running millions of machines, 1% is a lot of machines. However, it's also likely the case that the easy 1%s have already been found...

> This made me wonder -- would this kind of optimization be recognized and rewarded in colossal scale organizations?

It depends if this kind of optimization is valuable to the organization. Often times it's not. Spending money and time to save money and time is often viewed as less efficient than generating more revenue.