Where does your budget *actually* go?
I’m specifically referring to engineering organizations here, so, if you’re in one, do you *actually* know where your budget goes? And no, I’m not referring to your AWS data transfer costs , or your RDS spend , or whatever. You see, as humans, we like stories. We like our world to exist in some sort of linear narrative, where effect follows cause, and everything happens for a reason. The problems with this line of thought are • We tend to internalize this, and when the world doesn’t work the way we want it to, we get caught with our pants down, and • We are particularly bad at noticing when the narrative changes. In this particular case, consider where your no-longer fledgling engineering team is spending its money. When you started off, it was just a handful of you, and money was tight (it always is tight, unless you’re Google ). Odds are, you went through some sequence of the following pain points 1. Can we afford to hire one more person? Seriou...