Who’s really paying?
Every organization runs on costs nobody counts.
Not hidden costs — visible ones. A schema decision made once, in a hurry, that a decade later triples the size of every database and every license bill attached to it. A configuration offered to one customer that quietly commits a team to testing it forever.
I find those costs, put a number on them, and design the way out.
Primary keys stored as 36-character strings across ~1,600 tables. Rebuilt on integers and measured in the performance lab.
⅓ the size
Same workload, half the hardware — still faster than production at full size. Measured, not projected.
up to 30× faster
An ETL rewrite that couldn’t work. Optimised the existing packages instead of porting them.
5× & 6× throughput
Replication teardown on every upgrade. Five tables instead of eight hundred.
12 hrs → 10 min
The decision that caused all of it. Made once, by someone reasonable, in an afternoon.
no line item
The last row is the subject of the book. Costs that appear on no ledger are not small. They are unowned — and the person who decides is almost never the person who pays.
Three things I work on
People
I have led engineering organizations, and I co-founded a bilingual early-education school. Both are the same question at different scales: what does a person become capable of when the conditions are right?
Organizations
Structures decide outcomes long before individuals do. Most organizational failure is not a failure of character — it is a failure to put decision-making and cost-bearing in the same place.
Systems
Databases, platforms, and the architecture underneath both. This is where the costs become measurable, which is the only reason I can make the rest of the argument at all.
In progress
Who’s Really Paying?
A book about the costs organizations never put on a ledger — why they accumulate, why capable people keep producing them, and what it takes to make one visible.
You can pay now, or pay later — but later comes with interest and penalties.