Then he walked me through the team.
Two senior engineers, 30% of their time, on Spark cluster maintenance. One person on-call for jobs that fail at 3am. A third spent last quarter upgrading the Kubernetes operator. The lead data engineer quit in April — burnout, the team said.
They didn't save $80K. They spent $400K in engineer-hours and called it freedom.
Nobody runs this math. So let's actually run it — with code you can drop your own numbers into, because the values are illustrative and the model is the point.
The math nobody runs
