The Hidden Third of an Engineer: What One Team Learned by Leaving AWS
Imagine paying a full-time salary for someone whose only job is to keep the lights on — never touching the product, never shipping a feature customers see. Most small teams would say they can’t afford that. Yet a growing number of them are running exactly that setup, quietly, without ever seeing a line item for it. A seven-person internal tools team discovered this the hard way, and their story is a useful lens for anyone wondering why “we already have a solid AWS setup” isn’t always the end of the conversation.