Someoen accidentally saved half a million-dollars

Funny read. The author has a black belt in snark:

> “They hired some incredibly talented people to make this happen, and then like five times as many idiots.”

> “I'm a substantially less experienced engineer than many of the readers here, but suffice it to say that I can read documentation without panicking, which is considered S-tier in this country.”

> “I ping a chat full of good engineers and no managers to make sure I'm not about to nuke everything, then just do it.”

> “My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight.”

> “The subtext is that if we do this all slowly enough, it might seem like it took a lot of effort instead of just clicking buttons that I said had to be clicked almost a year ago.”

Sometimes relatively trivial actions can save millions.

Say, finding a "simple" bug in the firmware causing a lot of expensive industrial PCBs appear completely dead. Millions of dollars of savings in service personnel travel and board costs, in no time.

I left those computers idle so we can run a secret botnet and you messed it up!

It really is fun doing cost optimization at companies whose business model is setting money on fire in various clouds. Everything is over provisioned by at least a factor of ten and you look like a god damn hero for having like basic sysadmin knowledge.