If it was better for your previous firm to pay more than to optimize, it's actually preferring developers time (which cost money, as you know) over servers cost.
This can be cost effective until some point. I don't think it could get to the level of "100k users on 250 servers", and if it does.
If the other side of the coin is that you waste dev time AND that your site is down for a few hours..
Is it really worth the "culture fear"?
If it was better for your previous firm to pay more than to optimize, it's actually preferring developers time (which cost money, as you know) over servers cost.
This can be cost effective until some point. I don't think it could get to the level of "100k users on 250 servers", and if it does.
If the other side of the coin is that you waste dev time AND that your site is down for a few hours.. Is it really worth the "culture fear"?