The cost of onboarding a new engineer at a mid-sized cloud-infrastructure org never shows up on a finance dashboard. There's no line item for "hours spent searching for the right runbook" or "Slack threads asking how deployment works this quarter." The cost is real, it's measured in 14 to 22 hours per engineer per week for the first 8 weeks, and it compounds with every hire because the senior engineers who answer the questions lose 4 to 7 hours per week each at the same time. Six months of IDP work changes the shape of this cost. Not eliminates it. Reshapes it. The 8-week onboarding becomes 4-week onboarding. The 14 hours per week of access requests, runbook hunts, and deployment questions drops to 30 minutes per week of looking things up in the IDP catalog. The senior engineers stop being the canonical source of truth for "how do we deploy this quarter" because the IDP is.…