One of the trademarks of private equity ownership is the expectation that either the company maintains their current margin and grows revenue at 25-30%, or they instead grow slower and increase their free cash flow year over year. In many organizations, engineering costs have a major impact on their free cash flow. There are many costs to reduce, cloud hosting and such, but inevitably part of the discussion is addressing engineering headcount costs directly.| lethain.com
In my early career roles, I worked at companies that never worried about their infrastructure costs at all. They were simply too low a cost and growing too slowly for the Finance team to pay much attention to it. This “ignore it until it’s too large to ignore” approach served me well. Until it didn’t. Working at Uber, I was caught me off guard when a new Director joined and overnight infrastructure costs were recategorized from insignificant to requiring urgent, detailed review every ...| infraeng.dev
