Or just do this
1) Break something on purpose. 2) Make sure the business notice it (usually a spectacular cost increase does the job). 3) Come in and fix the issue 4) Make a cost comparison quick chart before/after 5) Become famous
1) Break something on purpose. 2) Make sure the business notice it (usually a spectacular cost increase does the job). 3) Come in and fix the issue 4) Make a cost comparison quick chart before/after 5) Become famous
If you look long enough in most code bases, you will eventually find a spectacular problem.
Case in point, I was working for several months for a client, and I had a slow afternoon, so I decided to convert some calculation to numpy, see if we gained any free perf.
We got a x100 local speed up, which was very fishy. Gaining speed is common with vectorization, but two orders of magnitude is a lot.
So I looked at the original algo. There was a glaring mistake in it, that I fixed by my numpy code without noticing, and just changing that in the pure Python algo, without using numpy at all, made it X50 faster.
I could then call my client, and celebrate the good news. Not "there was a mistake", no. But "we found margin for progress".
This is great framing.
Bugs in code are not really "mistakes"; they will occur. Finding and fixing them is a positive.
Were your clients nontechnical? Or did they just not care to know how you got a 50x speedup?
The technical team an in depth explanation with code snippets.
Know your audience.