Pixar's Render Farm

In the end it’s still more profitable to hire performance engineers than hardware. For the last decade I’ve heard the “toss more HW” argument. It hasn’t held because the amount of compute and storage goes up too.

That’s very much an exaggeration. Pixar/Google etc can’t run on a single desktop CPU and spends a lot of money on hardware. The best estimate I have seen is it’s scale dependent. At small budgets your generally spending most of that on people, but as the budget increase the ratio tends to shift to ever more hardware.

In reality it’s never as simple as a single soundbite. If you are a startup with $1k/mo AWS bills, throwing more hardware at the problem can be orders of magnitude cheaper. If you are running resource-intensive workloads then at some point efficiency work becomes ROI-positive.

The reason the rule of thumb is to throw more hardware at the problem is that most (good) engineers bias towards wanting to make things performant, in my experience often beyond the point where it’s ROI positive. But of course you should not take that rule of thumb as a universal law, rather it’s another reminder of a cognitive bias to keep an eye on.

It is absolutely about scale.... an employee costs $x of dollars regardless of how many servers they are managing, and might improve performance y%..... that only becomes worth it if y% of your hardware costs is greater than the $x for the employee.

The issue is extra employees run out of low hanging fruit to optimize, so that y% isn’t a constant. Extra hardware benefits from all the existing optimized code written by your team, where extra manpower needs to improve the already optimized code already written by your team.

Eventually you have to buy more hardware. The Pixars and Google have the most to gain from added expertise.

Yes - context matters. This article is about Pixar where it pays to have someone think about performance. My data points are only companies of 50 people and higher - in those cases cloud consumption was the number 2 cost line item behind people. It matters there. In most cases the people who know cost performance tend to be good at fighting latency - you need the same skills.

This may not apply on smaller side projects or places where technology is secondary.