A bit sarcastic, but still too close to reality for comfort:

For the managers, it's about a bonus. For engineers it's the existential question of future hirability: every future employer will love the candidate with experience in operating a $500k/a cluster. They guy who wrote a library that got linked into a service... Yeah, that's the kind they already have, not interested, move along.

The engineer who identified 500k in savings is a great candidate I'd say. But solving a problem requires a problem to be there in the first place.