It really depends on what you're doing. Back then a lot of non-VC startups worked better and the savings possibly helped. It also helps grow the team and have less reliance on the vendor. It's long term value.
Is it really time wasted? People often go into resume building mode and do all kinds of wacky things regardless. Perhaps this just helps scratch that itch.
But i don't see this being good from a pure business perspective.
I certainly hope not everyone does so. I've seen plenty of people lean choices based on resume / growth / interest than the pure good of the business but not to leave after doing so.
> But i don't see this being good from a pure business perspective.
And a business at the end of the day is operated by its people. Sure, there are a odd few that operate in good faith, but we're not robots or AI. I doubt every decision everywhere is 100% business optimal and if it's the only criteria.
Honest question: how long ago was that? I stepped away from that ecosystem four or so years ago. Perhaps ease of use has substantially improved?
All by design, really, because at that point you're not part of an engineering team you're a code monkey operating in service of growth metrics.
Whenever I see people doing something like this I remember I did the same when I was in 10 people startups and it required A LOT of work to keep all these things running (mostly because back then we didn't have all these cloud managed systems) and that time would have been better invested in the product instead of wasting time figuring out how these tools work.
I see value in this kind of work if you're at the scale of something like Dropbox and moving from S3 will greatly improve your bottom line and you have a team that knows exactly what they're doing and will be assigned the maintenance of this work. If this is being done merely from a cost cutting perspective and you don't have the people that understand these systems, its a recipe for disaster and once shit is on fire the people that would be assigned to "fix" the problem will quickly disappear because the "on call schedule is insane".