I got sucked into "weekly key metric takes over 14 hours to run on our multi-node kubernetes cluster" a while back. I'm not sure how many nodes it actually used, nor did I really care.
Digging into it, the python code ingested about ~50GB of various files, made well over a dozen copies of everything, leaving the whole thing extremely memory starved. I replaced almost all of the program with some "grep | sed | awk | sed | grep" abomination that stripped about 98% of the unnecessary info first and it ran in under 2 minutes on my laptop. I probably should have tightened it up more but I was more than happy to wash my hands of the whole thing by that point.
Instead of improving the code, they just kept tossing more compute at it. Still heard all kinds of grumbling about os.system('grep | sed | awk | sed | grep') not being "pythonic" and "bad practice"; but not enough that they actually bothered to fix it.