you joke, but it's the most powerful promotion technique. create something insanely efficient but still provides business value, and then spend 2-3 years "increasing efficiency" and publicizing it, then get promoted because you're so great at efficiency, repeat. "I saved $20,000 with this one neat trick!" (neat trick: turn off the servers you don't need)
No, that's kind of the trick of it. To be able to do this, the thing you create has to be, on a base level, insanely efficient compared to what came before. You're frontloading years of optimizations in one big leap.
On top of that solid basis, you can introduce artificial inefficiencies, and then gradually remove them.
But you can't do the trick at all, if your rewrite doesn't start off being an orders-of-magnitude efficiency improvement.
