I Accidentally Saved HALF A MILLION $ | Prime Reacts
TLDRThe speaker recounts a frustrating experience within a company where inefficiencies and red tape led to significant overspending on a failed analytics platform. Despite their efforts to optimize costs and save the company half a million dollars, their success was met with skepticism and political maneuvering, highlighting the challenges of driving change within bureaucratic organizations.
Takeaways
- 🚀 Inefficiencies in large organizations can lead to significant waste of resources and time, with a simple solution potentially saving a large amount of money.
- 💡 The script highlights the contrast between high past and high red tape environments, where bureaucracy can hinder quick decision-making and efficiency.
- 🎯 A single, decisive action taken by the speaker saved half a million dollars, showcasing the impact of effective problem-solving in a timely manner.
- 🤖 The lack of data science utilization in the organization and the focus on hiring consultants instead of streamlining processes led to inefficiencies and wasted potential.
- 🛠️ The speaker's experience with the advanced analytics platform (AAP) demonstrates the pitfalls of long development cycles and missed deadlines, which can lead to project failures.
- 🔧 Technical debt and poorly designed systems can accumulate over time, creating complex and inefficient processes that are hard to maintain and scale.
- 🔍 The script emphasizes the importance of having competent engineers and domain experts working collaboratively to build sensible systems and processes.
- 💼 The bureaucratic resistance to simple solutions and the preference for lengthy approval processes can stifle innovation and efficiency within an organization.
- 📈 The case study reveals how organizational politics and the desire for status can lead to infighting and a lack of cooperation, even when faced with successful outcomes.
- 📊 The misuse of tools and technologies, such as Snowflake and Lambda, can result in unnecessarily high operational costs and inefficient data processing.
- 📈 The script concludes with a call for organizations to value and empower competent individuals to make impactful decisions, rather than being hindered by red tape and politics.
Q & A
How much money did the speaker save the company by accident?
-The speaker saved the company half a million dollars accidentally.
What inefficiency did the speaker solve that led to such a significant cost saving?
-The speaker identified and corrected an inefficiency in the company's configuration panel that was causing unnecessary expenses.
What was the speaker's role in the organization?
-The speaker was a data scientist in the organization.
What was the speaker's reaction to the company's process for clicking a button?
-The speaker found the company's process of having to get sign-offs and meetings to click a button to be unnecessarily bureaucratic and reminiscent of their first job at a larger corporation with a lot of red tape.
What was the speaker's opinion on the analytics platform the company wanted to create?
-The speaker viewed the analytics platform initiative as a failure, citing reasons such as the hiring of unqualified individuals and the platform's long-delayed deployment.
What was the speaker's suggestion for improving the company's inefficiencies?
-The speaker suggested firing most of the staff in every team, leaving behind those with good domain knowledge, and allowing them to collaborate with good engineering teams to build sensible processes and systems.
How did the speaker describe the technical debt and system design of the analytics platform?
-The speaker described it as an 'insane dumpster fire spider web of technical debt' with poor design decisions, security issues, and inefficient use of technologies.
The speaker felt that the company's budgeting practices were misleading, with actual operational costs being significantly higher than the original estimates, leading to a drastic overspend on database costs.
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What was the outcome of the speaker's cost-saving action?
-After the speaker's action, the projected bill dropped from a million to half a million dollars, but it led to increased meetings and recognition for the team, despite the simplicity of the solution.
What did the speaker request from management after saving a significant amount of money?
-The speaker requested a 30k raise from management after saving 500k, but their message remained unread, suggesting they might not receive the raise or would only receive a smaller increment.
What was the speaker's final advice based on their experience?
-The speaker advised learning from their mistake of applying oneself and achieving great success only to be punished for it, implying that sometimes doing nothing might be more beneficial in certain organizational structures.
Outlines
🚀 Inefficiency and Accidental Cost-Saving
The speaker recounts an experience where they saved their company half a million dollars in mere minutes by addressing an industry inefficiency. This accomplishment outshines their entire career earnings for their employers. The narrative highlights the speaker's frustration with corporate red tape and inefficiencies, leading to the cancellation of a colleague's contract due to inability to make swift decisions. The speaker reflects on their early career at a large corporation where even simple tasks like clicking a button required multiple levels of approval, contrasting sharply with their current situation where a simple action led to significant cost savings.
🤔 The Paradox of Remote Work and Technical Debt
The speaker discusses the challenges of working in a remote company that has been struggling with a technical debt for five years. Despite the company's claims of being data-driven and hiring talented individuals, the speaker questions their role in the organization. The company's analytics platform, which was supposed to be launched, is delayed multiple times, and the speaker criticizes the hiring of big firm consultants that promise progress at half the price. The speaker also pokes fun at the idea of starting a company named 'Big Firm Consultants' that promises to make companies unsuccessful.
🔧 A Mess of Mismanagement and Unresolved Issues
The speaker describes a chaotic situation where a company's technical infrastructure is riddled with mismanagement and unresolved issues. They mention a file in the project repository that could delete the production environment and the lack of backups. The speaker is incredulous at the company's practices, such as saving admin credentials in plaintext and stitching together systems with spreadsheets. They also express disbelief at the complexity of the data processing system that handles less than a terabyte of data per day at a high cost, which is more than the team's salary.
💡 The Budget Overrun and the Cost-Saving Moment
The speaker reveals that the company's budget for database costs was drastically overrun, with the operational costs reaching close to a million dollars instead of the intended 200k. They criticize the company's accounting tricks that make it seem like they've had significant wins, but in reality, the new operational model is much more expensive. The speaker then shares their experience of optimizing costs, which led to a significant reduction in the projected bill. However, they express frustration at the company's reaction and the political maneuvering that followed.
🎉 Unwanted Consequences of Successful Cost-Cutting
The speaker shares the aftermath of their successful cost-cutting举措, which led to a projected savings of half a million dollars. Despite the achievement, the speaker faced negative reactions from other teams and even their own management. They describe the company's reluctance to attribute the savings to a simple change and instead preferred to portray it as a result of careful analysis. The speaker also expresses disappointment at being asked to write PowerPoint presentations to justify the cost-saving举措, which they found emotionally painful.
📈 Lessons from the Corporate World
The speaker reflects on their experience in the corporate world, highlighting the challenges of navigating company politics and the emotional toll of being underutilized. They share their desire to work in a startup environment where efficiency and problem-solving are prioritized over bureaucracy. The speaker also talks about the increase in meetings they have to attend due to their cost-saving success, which they find counterproductive. They end with a call for similar stories from others to feel less alone in their experiences and a commentary on the emotional impact of corporate mismanagement.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Inefficiency
💡Red Tape
💡Data Science
💡Analytics Platform
💡Technical Debt
💡ETL Pipeline
💡Cost Optimization
💡Organizational Politics
💡Stealth Senior Engineer
💡Power BI
Highlights
The speaker saved their company half a million dollars in five minutes by identifying and addressing an industry inefficiency.
A configuration panel's inefficiency led to significant cost savings when finally addressed, despite initial resistance within the company.
The speaker's experience reflects a common issue where large corporations have excessive red tape, hindering efficiency and progress.
The company's decision to create an analytics platform led to the hiring of talented individuals but was marred by the involvement of less competent staff.
The speaker's accidental cost-saving discovery highlights the inefficiencies in the company's processes and the potential for improvement.
The deployment of the Advanced Analytics Platform (AAP) was plagued by delays and excuses, showing poor project management and execution.
The speaker's experience with the AAP team exposed a technical debt and convoluted processes that hindered the company's progress.
The company's budgeting practices were called into question, as the actual costs of operations far exceeded initial estimates.
The use of Snowflake as a database led to high operational costs due to the way it charges for query processing.
The speaker's simple solution of removing unnecessary code (sleep 10) from the system resulted in substantial cost savings.
The company's internal politics and resistance to change made it difficult for the speaker to implement the cost-saving measures.
Despite the significant cost savings, the speaker did not receive recognition or a raise, highlighting the company's flawed reward system.
The speaker's experience underscores the need for organizations to streamline processes and empower competent individuals to make impactful changes.
The transcript reveals a culture of inefficiency and waste within the company, where simple solutions are overlooked due to bureaucracy.
The speaker's story serves as a cautionary tale for companies to avoid overcomplicating processes and to encourage innovation and efficiency.
The transcript highlights the importance of effective communication and collaboration within organizations to prevent costly inefficiencies.
The speaker's account of their experience provides a stark contrast between the potential for innovation and the barriers created by corporate culture.