> So you can have a whole board full of people that studied history and art and French, and they sit there making our cloud decisions. And they simply don’t know.

> And if there had been more nerds in that room, some of these things would not have happened. And that is also a call to maybe us nerds, although you don’t really look that nerdy, but do join those meetings.

> Because quite often, we as technical people, we’re like, “Ah, these meetings are an interruption of my work, and I’m not joining that meeting.” And while you were not there, the company decided to outsource everything to India.

Oof. This is hitting me hard on two levels.

As I'm racking up years in the operational business, the best impact I can have isn't that I can understand log files twice as fast as the guy next to me. Many people can learn that. The bigger impact is to be able to connect the effects of technical decisions onto the overall business and vice-versa to higher management.

Like, sure, I can rattle down a lot of technical requirements we need to self-host a highly available infrastructure, and I can rattle down a lot of the advantages of the cloud /in a small company situation/ and such.

But that is largely useless to the CEO of a small and medium business. The more interesting statement is: Self-hosting requires a larger upfront and a larger continuous investment over time at a certain range of scale. You need to buy servers, firewall, switches, rent bandwidth and DC space and to hire people to take care of all of these. However, we can achieve a higher level of security and data protection on these systems and in the long run, we can become cheaper than the big cloud providers, because the current product-visions are already decently big. The cloud can be more flexible and innovate faster, but we will have more security discussions with our customers and the control over our systems will be lower, for better or worse.

Put this way, we're setting up a pretty good self-hosted plan, which primarily uses the cloud as a way out if we or our DC hosters fuck up.

This plan cost the company more money than the existing cloud infra would have for a year or two, but now it is starting to pay off and in a year or two, hardware extensions will be a welcome expense.

But that is bringing me to a second point, deeper point: This only works because the board here is fine planning for benefits 3-5 years down the line. "In 2-3 years we'll be even", we said, and "in 3-5 years we'll be cheaper, a lot". We're even now 2 years after.

If they were just maximizing next quarters profits, we probably would have migrated everything to AWS and just started shoveling more money across the Atlantic, making us highly dependent on cross-atlantic and US infrastructure. It would've been cheaper for a year or so.

And this profit-maximizing mindset looming over good decisions and great tech is frustrating me.

Generative AI is similar there to me. Generative AI should be something I should be excited about. For example, Runegate Studios cooperated ethically with Unleash the Archers and Bo Bradshaw to create a music video[1] in Bo's style we just wouldn't have without generative AI and it would never be created without. And like, sure, it's not Disney quality, but you're looking at ~10 people cooperating here. For that headcount, that video is amazing.

But I know it will be used to slash jobs, prevent juniors from learning because AI is cheaper, ruin careers "because the AI can do 80% for less costs" and such. Short-term perspectives. And then in 10 years there will be a crisis of "Why can't we find good writers/cartoonists/musicians/... anymore?"

Sorry for the TED-talk. I'm currently torn between a very excited and a very frustrated person.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLPMBD7i0IU