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 month.
Adding the instrumentation and accountability for these costs retroactively was a difficult retrofit.
Although I was surprised that time, I’ve come to appreciate that all successful
companies go through the transition from ignoring to setting goals on infrastructure costs,
and an early focus during my time at Stripe was ensuring we were ready ahead of that shift.