[HN Gopher] Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?
Author : osel
Score : 296 points
Date : 2020-07-14 10:11 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (isitworththecost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (isitworththecost.com)
| thatoneuser wrote:
| This is great! Walking through the numbers mentally kinda works,
| but it seems people are always suspicious they're being had.
| Seeing it live will be very reassuring.
| alecco wrote:
| Missing: gains in time to market.
| KerryJones wrote:
| This is looks like a different approach to a tool I also tried to
| address to answer 'how much time should you invest in training'
| https://kerryjones.github.io/sharpen-the-saw/
|
| Had a whole article that went into this:
| https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-much-time-should-you-inves...
|
| I like the idea and it's certainly more detailed than mine, but I
| think some explanation of how this should be used and context is
| important.
| ponker wrote:
| The two biggest line items are not easily measured and thus not
| included: The removal of an external dependency that you don't
| control and may not evolve with your needs, and the loss of the
| continuous improvement in that dependency without continuous
| investment from you.
| redwood wrote:
| What's this type of calculator often misses is how nuanced and
| complex is to estimate the cost of employee time.
|
| It's not just the cost of an employee salary per hour... Is the
| opportunity cost of everything that employee could have instead
| done.
|
| After all it isn't as though with more money you can just
| immediately get more fully ramped sophisticated employees to add
| value... All of that is complex.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is also the cost of not understanding details that you
| left to someone else. If you save time but no longer know what
| is happening you can get into big trouble when those details
| matter.
| femto wrote:
| And the related, more general, risk of an additional external
| dependency: what happens if the service disappears, changes
| or goes wrong?
| AQXt wrote:
| Feature request:
|
| Add "One-time payment" option to the cost of the service.
|
| This could be used to decide if you allocate resources to
| implement a new feature in an internal system.
| osel wrote:
| Hey all, thanks for the great feedback!
|
| I submitted this just before retiring for the evening NZ time
| thinking not much of it, it was awesome to find this discussion
| this morning!
| dzonga wrote:
| but there's a hidden cost, that's never spoken of. cost of
| forgotten knowledge or expertise. say you use AWS RDS | Aurora,
| on paper it's cheap. AWS runs everything for you. what happens,
| when one day you need the knowledge to run your own db ? or
| migrate to something different altogether ?
| tunesmith wrote:
| ha, awesome! I've had this idea so many times from the xkcd comic
| (which I see was inspiration). I'm glad someone actually built a
| tool for it. It could be a fun learning project for a simple
| mobile app too.
| drapery wrote:
| Okay I really like the idea. I think the bottom line whether the
| SaaS is worth the cost with the premise is that the SaaS saves
| time. However, time saving (item 4) is pretty difficult to gauge.
| Therefore, I suggest having a version where time saving is the
| output.
|
| So then the question become, I have to believe that this SaaS
| will save XXXmin per employee for me to consider buying it.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Good work OP. Any plans to add more variables in the future? e.g.
| Cost of current equivalent service being used.
|
| P.S. I've added your calculator to my curated list of startup
| tools[1].
|
| [1]https://startuptoolchain.com/#operations
| aisofteng wrote:
| What about the cost of operating an equivalent service in house?
| unixfg wrote:
| If you're honestly appraising costs, the same evaluation would
| apply to on-prem as well. 3-year refreshes, software updates,
| support, power, bandwidth, etc
| georgyo wrote:
| This seems really flawed.
|
| Let's plug in numbers. This says that if a service costs
| 125$/month/employee and I have 1000 employees ($125000/month) I
| will save ~5 million a year.
|
| However a service costing 1.5 million at such a company has other
| costs.
|
| Namely that a product that costs that much almost always needs an
| in house support team. I have never seen the case where an
| expensive product also didn't need 2-3 people in just to maintain
| and support it. But the employee time savings is still worth it.
|
| The next cost is much harder. In the tool we said this will save
| everyone 1 hour a day. However saving people time is not normally
| what a tool actually does. PagerDuty for example doesn't save
| people any time, it just sends alerts. Alerts that come from
| another tool that must be set up. At 40/person/month for 1000
| people, that is 40,000 a month for zero "saved time." The value
| of pagerduty for very different.
|
| But anyone who has been in the field has seen, that list hidden
| cost is that a paid service isn't normally a perfect fit. It is
| missing something, or your particular use case doesn't map
| cleanly. You then have an army of people working around the tool,
| saving negative time. The business might have reasons to still
| use that tool. But saving time is not one of them.
|
| So seeing this tool tell me that a service which cost $2,000,000
| a year is going to save me $5,000,000 feels like naive marketing
| nonsense. And it isn't even marketing a product.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Let 's plug in numbers. This says that if a service costs
| 125$/month/employee and I have 1000 employees ($125000/month) I
| will save ~5 million a year.
|
| However a service costing 1.5 million at such a company has
| other costs._
|
| $125/month is the price, not the cost. You need to plug in the
| _full_ cost.
| irjustin wrote:
| This complaint seems really flawed.
|
| > PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just
| sends alerts.
|
| Have you tried building a pagerduty in house? That is literally
| the time save. The "value of pagerduty" is still measured the
| same way as any other tool.
|
| Do I build it custom in house? Do I pay someone else a modest
| amount?
|
| That is what this tool is doing and is geared towards startups
| who make this decision very regularly. It's got 5 question
| boxes - of course, there's no way it's going to cover an
| enterprise consideration that needs 3 analysts to decide
| whether buying that SAP module is really worth $3mm/year.
|
| Someone made a free tool and you're complaining about it as if
| it shouldn't exist. Very unsupportive.
|
| Downvoted.
| falcolas wrote:
| FWIW, if you're building a paging system, you're doing it
| wrong. There's open source projects which can do HA paging
| for you.
|
| It requires a higher touch than pagerduty, but pagerduty
| isn't 100% labor free either.
| georgyo wrote:
| Perhaps I was overly grumpy. But I get pulled into these
| discussions a lot. The company now has a very strong newly (2
| years) developed "buy not build" mentality.
|
| Half the products we have bought have had full internal teams
| to support. And many don't suite our needs, so we have enitre
| development teams building abstractions that are more complex
| than the product we bought so we can use the product we
| bought. And some of those abstractions have been in
| development for 2 years so no one can use the product yet.
|
| My only point is that buying vs building is complex. When you
| boil that down to a tool that essentially says always buy, it
| causes a bit of PTSD for me.
| rachelbythebay wrote:
| Do you work at Lyft?
| kdelok wrote:
| Even if it does boil down to that, there might still be
| value in ranking the savings per service you buy in. Except
| for a core product, it is almost always going to be the
| case that buying in is cheaper than building it. However,
| having limited resources, it's valuable to work out what
| tools could give you the best value for money, and which
| others are a more marginal call (given the uncertainty
| about support work etc.)
| wil421 wrote:
| Sounds like your company needs to do a little more
| evaluation and due diligence before buy an off the shelf
| product. I work at "Megacorp" and it took way less than 2
| years to get 20k employees and an equal number of customers
| onto our off the shelf ticketing platform.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I see this alot too. Products that are forced from above
| and not used, used under gun point etc. Also products that
| kinda don't fit in and where it would be just better to
| build it in house since the subset of functionaliy that is
| needed is quite small, and so on.
| hedora wrote:
| > _Have you tried building a pagerduty in house?_
|
| Yup. Took an afternoon. I was being cheap, so you had to give
| it the name of the cell phone provider along with the phone
| number.
|
| Most of what pagerduty does was unnecessary for the use case,
| so the clone was really simple.
|
| Also, pagerduty is harder to manage than the clone (it just
| had a single text file with a line per user), again, for that
| use case.
|
| So, time saved is negative per user. However, the clone
| probably would have been harder to admin over time. It might
| have needed about a developer-day per month.
|
| Most enterprise tooling I've seen is really about shifting
| work between cost centers. It's hard to model that in a
| simple calculator.
| wil421 wrote:
| Agreed. Pagerduty and similar notifications systems can be
| life savers for support people. Especially if they are
| integrated into a ticketing or event management system.
| whatl3y wrote:
| I feel you missed the point (or maybe that the landing page for
| this tool should better communicate the value and when you
| should use it).
|
| If you're a relatively small company looking to use a plug-and-
| play SaaS product with a modest subscription fee to serve some
| business purpose this is a great tool to get some quick and
| dirty numbers on whether it would be better to use or maybe
| build in house or go another route.
|
| If you're purchasing some large, highly configurable enterprise
| tool (with high implementation and support costs) that all 1k
| of your employees will use daily and you'd like to understand
| cost/benefit, other means of calculating this should be used
| (and it would likely require days to weeks of multiple people's
| time to make such a calculation).
| falcolas wrote:
| I see this exact same thing. Let's take Splunk into
| consideration. Administrating splunk, all of our feeds into
| splunk, and trying to keep us from overrunning our quotas is
| about 1 full time person, and half a full-time person worth of
| DevOps work yearly. That's in addition to the subscription
| costs we pay to Splunk directly.
|
| Every piece of software requires in-house support; even
| pagerduty and their ilk require management time to set up
| schedules, adding and removing people. It's not a lot of time,
| about .1 to .2 of a person's time for all of our pageable
| employees, but a manager's or leader's time is not cheap.
| hedora wrote:
| Also, splunk is considerably more difficult to use (no CLI,
| loses jobs, etc) and less powerful (no joins, incomplete
| results) than a farm of Linux log servers and some ssh
| tooling, such as cluster ssh, or whatever.
|
| There's also the question of whether the splunk log agents
| are more or less of a pain to administer than whatever log
| management they replace.
|
| Finally, there's the question of how the resulting reports
| shape people's behavior and productivity.
|
| If you add that all up, learning it is a waste of time for
| people that can code up a join in perl from muscle memory,
| but it saves training time for people that can't.
|
| In the end, every one less productive than they would be with
| some other tool.
| drapery wrote:
| I think a lot of users are missing the point. I don't see this
| tool as a final decision maker and it can never be one. The final
| decision has a lot of nuisances to that it is difficult to
| capture in one tool, so might as well just open a spreadsheet and
| bang it out.
|
| I see this tool as a quick a simple way to eliminate all the
| tools that might look shiny and slick or save a few clicks, but
| doesn't actually save employee's time at all.
|
| So the decision becomes, I like the way this new SaaS feels or
| looks than our current one, but is it really worth the additional
| cost?
| osel wrote:
| Exactly, and scale is important too. The initial target
| audience was small (as in very small, maybe 1-10 people)
| businesses, whose owners often don't intuitively understand how
| beneficial small services costs can be.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Saving money doesn't put cash in your pocket. It will help keep
| the cash you have there, but is nothing but another cost item.
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Good tool, but, as someone mentioned, there are a number of other
| factors.
|
| 1) Brand reinforcement/damage.
|
| This one is really hard to quantify, but can mean the difference
| between the life, or the death, of the corporation. If the tool
| we choose causes some damage to the brand (like not giving us the
| ability to display the brand in an appropriate manner), or
| introduces a brand-damaging problem (like causing a particular
| kind of service to have an extra step or two, or even amplify
| customer pain), then there could be issues.
|
| On the plus side, it could also significantly fortify a brand, by
| doing things like having the brand appear in places that were
| disregarded, or considered "out of reach," or it could amplify
| the advantages of a brand-connected service.
|
| Branding is a "dark art" to many literal-minded folks like
| engineers, but it is unbelievably valuable. It should always be
| considered, when thinking about things like this.
|
| This morning, I had this demonstrated to me in a visceral manner.
| I made an order yesterday, and asked for expedited delivery. When
| I made the order, it said the expedited delivery would arrive
| today, but when I received the confirmation, it said the order
| would arrive tomorrow.
|
| Sound familiar? Amazon is notorious for this nasty little trick.
| Most of the time, it's Prime Delivery, which means we don't
| really have much room to complain.
|
| It wasn't Amazon. I won't name the corporation, but it is one
| that is synonymous with extremely high (arrogant, even) quality.
|
| This silly little trick, with a cheap, third-party item, caused
| brand damage with a loyal customer that has spent six figures
| with them. I won't drop them, and the world won't stop turning
| because I won't get my item until tomorrow, but the simple fact
| that they did the "shipping bait and switch" on me, means that
| I'll never use them again for this kind of purchase.
|
| That's brand damage.
|
| To add insult to injury, when I tried contacting them about it, I
| had to run the gauntlet of what I call the "AI Picador," which
| throws as many roadblocks as possible in your path, before
| allowing connection to a human.
|
| This workflow ensures that I will be steaming mad before I get to
| the human, and it's all I can do to avoid venting to them (it
| isn't their fault -it's their bosses').
|
| 2) Staff morale.
|
| Will bringing in the service reinforce or damage staff morale? It
| may help folks do their jobs a lot easier (good), or it may
| result in a lot of folks losing their jobs (bad, or _very_ bad,
| depending on many factors, like how the layoffs are done, and how
| the folks that remain are treated).
|
| 3) Dependence/Addiction
|
| If bringing in a dependency ties us to a
| corporation/language/toolset, is that good or bad? It may be
| quite good, if it's a good service, and a good corporation, but
| it could also be incredibly bad.
| notahacker wrote:
| If you're big enough for your brand image to be damaged by your
| bug reporting tool, customer analytics or payment flow having a
| third party logo, you're probably more in the realms of paying
| for the enterprise grade white labelling offering than 'are ten
| seats worth the money' anyway. Of course you can definitely
| wreck your sales with spammy use of email automation tools or
| evasive customer service, but that's more to do with how tools
| are used than the third party involvement.
|
| And if SaaS is valuable enough to actually replace staff you've
| outgrown the simple decision making aid too, although I agree
| that you can dent morale at the margin by introducing SaaS
| oriented towards micromanagement or somewhat improve it with
| less crappy processes even with the simplest of software
| changes.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| For smaller organizations, the "plus" could outweigh the
| "minus."
|
| For example, if the "beancounter" calculation says that the
| SaaS tool is "not worth it," but bringing it in might
| significantly project the brand, then it may be worth it, in
| a big way.
|
| Same with advertising, but advertising is a bit easier to
| measure (after the fact, as opposed to before). Brand value
| is really difficult to measure in any kind of empirical
| manner.
|
| But a bug reporting tool, if exposed to customers, is a
| _very_ important branding surface.
|
| Error handling/reporting is a _huge_ deal that is often
| neglected by tech folks. For many of us, a console print or
| log entry may be quite sufficient, but for an end user, they
| may need a lot more HI.
|
| I've encountered some ghastly bug reporting tools that were
| obviously designed by techs, for techs.
| saadalem wrote:
| This but for E-commerce will be huge ! It would be cool to
| calculate a product's overall cost through its life span.
| glenjamin wrote:
| Might be interesting to have a line items for "cognitive cost of
| having to deal with the crappy in-house tool when you know a good
| SaaS alternative exists" and "time spent wrangling the finance
| department"
| glaberficken wrote:
| I was going to say. The biggest cost for most organizations is
| the recruitment and training costs of an employee that leaves
| due to demotivation stemming from having to do "robotic" tasks.
| afarrell wrote:
| An employee who struggles with that is, by definition, no
| longer at the organization. So, there is nobody who would
| tell a decision-maker about that cost.
|
| Another example:
|
| Let's say Company Z has a mailing list with all 200 engineers
| on it. Folks such as the CTO and senior leadership use it to
| announce important events, to send out recordings of
| meetings. Let's also say that the company has their alerting
| infrastructure set up so that whenever any service had an
| exception (server or browser), it emails the stacktrace to
| this same list.
|
| How does this affect people? There is a wide range:
|
| * Group A: Is naturally unbothered by it. Their inbox is
| always full but it is no big deal.
|
| * Group B: Finds it to be a minor annoyance.
|
| * Group C: Is seriously frustrated by it, but they just
| filter all the emails to a folder and accept that they'll
| miss a bunch.
|
| * Group D: Finds it actively difficult to not pay attention
| to this, especially because they've heard too many stories
| about Alert Fatigue. They feel bad about just ignoring all
| alerts, including the ones for services they maintain.
|
| Group C is going to be less productive and less tapped-in to
| whats going on. So they will be less influential at the
| company. Groups A and B are going to be more visibly
| productive and successful. they will gain seniority and
| influence. Any member of Group D who does not teach
| themselves to ignore the alert emails will be so unproductive
| that they will be fired. They certainly won't have any
| influence, especially if they keep bringing up niche issues
| like emails when there are more important things to deal
| with.
|
| Therefore, from the perspective of Company Z's decision-
| makers (members of groups A and B), there is not really any
| cost to continuing to send email this way.
|
| For more commentary on this: https://danluu.com/wat/
| notahacker wrote:
| A cynic might suggest 'cognitive cost of having to use
| overblown SaaS tools instead of a simple list, calendar event
| or email/chat message' and 'time spent making additional
| records in or collecting vanity metrics from the SaaS to
| justify its continued existence' ought to be in there in the
| interests of balance.
| _jal wrote:
| Counterpoint: Jira.
| osel wrote:
| Hmm, cost of meetings (similar to training costs) is a good
| idea, definitely an issue I've seen before - thousands of
| dollars wasted arguing over $50/month for a tool.
| dtech wrote:
| > time spent wrangling the finance department
|
| Oh god, those cases when you'd love to try some tool or
| increase the plan to go over an auditing line but no-one has
| the energy to push it through the bureaucracy
| osel wrote:
| A simple check on whether purchasing a service is worth the cost
| - built in an afternoon in response to a previous HN discussion
| [1].
|
| A few people expressed interest in embedding something similar in
| a landing page, so I've open-sourced the code for others to use
| if they wish.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22497093
| glaberficken wrote:
| Under "Service cost" it could use an option for "one time
| purchase fee". Obviously that is going to create special cases
| for the "amortizations" output
| osel wrote:
| Cheers, a few people of suggested this. As you note, it
| rather depends on the amortization period.
|
| At the moment it assumes 1 year for training costs to be
| amortized over, so I guess one-time purchase would be similar
| - configurable assumptions (or at list, visibility into the
| assumptions) is on the list of things to do.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Yep... conceptually, you want to quantify, recurring gains,
| recurring costs, one-time gains, and one-time costs.
| [deleted]
| Sebb767 wrote:
| That's great! Thanks for taking the time to build it.
| projektfu wrote:
| I like the idea, but a lot of other factors are missing from the
| analysis.
|
| 1. I've yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per
| employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time?
|
| 2. Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that
| time to the company's advantage?
|
| 3. How much does this increase or decrease my personal time
| required as supervisor?
|
| 4. From a financial point of view, I'm still paying the employee
| and the service, so either I need enough services and time
| savings that I can eliminate a job, or the service has to have
| positive ROI of its own.
|
| And probably many more. I often receive proposals of this type,
| that I could be "saving" so much by buying something. The money
| goes out up front, the savings are supposed to trickle back in
| these hard to quantify and use ways.
| groby_b wrote:
| > Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use
| that time to the company's advantage?
|
| Take a management class or three, it'll save you a lot of
| money.
|
| Seriously. If _that_ needs to figure into the evaluation of the
| service, something is deeply broken in the culture of your
| company. Not because employees goof off - it happens, and only
| some amount of that is under your control. But because you
| assume that given any chance, people would goof off _more_.
|
| That's far from normal. It usually happens if employees feel
| mistreated, or if they're not given a fair share of the value
| they create. Possibly if they're already halfway to leaving.
| projektfu wrote:
| You're adding value judgements into it that are not there. A
| person can be working, accomplishing the same amount, and
| take 35 or 40 hours to do the task, without goofing off.
| groby_b wrote:
| They can also go home. They can tackle other work. The fact
| that they don't is a reflection of the work culture. You're
| right, I judge that.
| dijit wrote:
| > I've yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per
| employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time?
|
| Sure you have, albeit by another name likely.
|
| GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.
|
| I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a
| week in aggregate.
|
| Then there's services such as managed CI or, heck even things
| like the "search" function on a wiki, those are all things that
| can be provided by a service.
|
| But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth
| investing in a service vs hiring someone dedicated and running
| something yourself.
|
| > Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use
| that time to the company's advantage?
|
| There's two points to this argument;
|
| 1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me?
|
| 2) if I'm an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have
| to be in the office 9hrs per day.
|
| The first argument is at odds with the notion that most
| knowledge worker jobs tend to only be around 40% productive.[0]
|
| There's no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the
| reasons that percentage is so low, though, is friction.
| Friction can take many forms such as a bureaucratic process for
| approvals to change things- all the way to "needing to talk to
| that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an
| outage". It's hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions
| and there is evidence to suggest that removing these frictions
| increases productivity, not lessens it. (To a value of 80%
| which represents a significant increase).
|
| (I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is
| from a phone)
|
| Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you're in the
| office you must be busy- there's no value to you the employee
| of the company gets more efficient! Except obviously that's not
| true in a more macro sense; I wouldn't argue that. I would
| instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with
| doing actual work and not busywork will make people more
| engaged and not less.
|
| You wouldn't feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble
| your chair each time you wanted to sit in it, it would be
| tedious and not challenging and certainly cause you to mentally
| check out.
|
| [0]: https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-
| spend...
| projektfu wrote:
| To the extent that a service avoids yak shaving, definitely
| that value can be quantified. How do I know it won't cause
| yak shaving though?
| wil421 wrote:
| How does Github save time over the predecessors like self
| hosted a Git or SVN repository?
| deviantfero wrote:
| Pull request management, code reviews, CI flows, github
| actions, github does have many features that other git
| clients don't, certainly not a self hosted git or SVN
| repositories, and those features save a lot of time just in
| the ease of initial setup.
| dijit wrote:
| This is reductionist, I am not the first to fall in line to
| support github here, but lets expand on what github is
| instead of assuming.
|
| Github is, primarily, managed source code hosting- but it
| has more components, so lets break them out:
|
| 1: Source code hosting
|
| 2: Web view
|
| 3: Issue tracking
|
| 4: Project management tracking
|
| 5: Search
|
| 6: Authentication and identity (oauth2 and "applications")
|
| 7: Documentation rendering
|
| 8: Web hosting (a-la github pages)
|
| 9: CI pipeline (github actions)
|
| SVN replaces point 1, and poorly. How many hours do you
| need to manage an SVN server? Very few I would wager but it
| at least behooves to ask the question. And it certainly
| behooves to understand that you're not replacing 1:1;
| you're replacing many things with one, and managing the
| above yourself can be done cheaper, but poorer, so that
| "poor" imitation could cost more time for using it too.
|
| It's a very nuanced topic but an interesting one, and
| reductionist questions like this are not helpful.
| jeremymcanally wrote:
| Permissions. I specifically remember talking to Tom and
| Chris about how that was really the main point of rage that
| spawned the idea of GitHub (and its original slogan "Git
| hosting: No longer a pain in the ass").
| ori_b wrote:
| Did you spend 5 hours per week per employee managing
| permissions in git?
| cmbell715 wrote:
| Maybe not managing permissions directly. But I could
| easily see a number like that, or higher, being plausible
| if you consider clean up from junior devs accidentally
| pushing to development/main branches thinking they were
| on their feature branch. Which is an issue directly
| solved by permissions.
| jeremymcanally wrote:
| Setting up and managing keys, spinning up new repos, etc.
| would suck up an inordinate amount of time. This was
| especially true when I worked at consultancies. Blocking
| developer work with "Sorry gotta wait on Todd to add you
| to the server and set you up on Git," when Todd would
| avoid it like the plague because it sucked would lose a
| lot of time.
|
| If you averaged the time out, it may not have hit the
| five hour per week mark, but it combined with other time
| savers (linking Git directly with the issue tracker for
| example instead of having to figure out how to cross
| reference them) easily did/does.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Sure you have, albeit by another name likely._
|
| > _GitHub /Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a
| week._
|
| > _I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple
| hours a week in aggregate._
|
| > _Then there's services such as managed CI or, heck even
| things like the "search" function on a wiki, those are all
| things that can be provided by a service._
|
| These are three highly subjective, very unconvincing
| statements. I use Github, Gitlab, multiple slackbots (some I
| wrote, some others wrote), managed CI, and a few search
| services internally in my company every day. I have no
| confidence that any of them are timesavers in the way that
| you state.
|
| Slackbots in particular have been shown to use more time than
| they save (context switching is extremely costly). Github is
| a source-code host that ads distracting social features,
| notification queues, etc. all which can add to an employees
| distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a
| more basic code-host.
|
| I'm not saying they _don 't_ save time in aggregate, but
| there's certainly arguments on either side.
| throwaway43234 wrote:
| > notification queues ... which can add to an employees
| distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to
| a more basic code-host.
|
| If you think your employees would be less productive if
| they didn't have a queue of work items to address and co-
| worker comments to look at and respond to... let's just I
| wouldn't work at your shop. You running a room full of air-
| gapped code production units or something?
| mattigames wrote:
| > all which can add to an employees distraction load and
| decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-
| host.
|
| Is a bit naive to think those features are the ones
| distracting the employees, when if you watch a developer at
| work 98% of the time-wasters are the strongly attractive
| ones: YouTube, Instagram, etc.
| dijit wrote:
| I know a company which I will not name, that was passing
| source-code around with a USB drive.
|
| Their version of an SVN lock was basically 'who has the USB
| stick right now'. And while this is an absurd and extreme
| example (and a true one, crucially) you can't deny that
| github would have saved those developers countless hours.
|
| Maybe even enough hours to pay a person full time to manage
| something on-site: but that's why this topic (and the OP's
| site) is interesting, how do we quantify it?
| jonfw wrote:
| You're supposed to compare a service against it's
| competition, not the least productive thing you could
| possibly imagine in it's stead.
|
| If you walked into a car dealership and the best thing
| they could say is "It's WAY better than walking!"- that
| wouldn't make a great pitch.
| dijit wrote:
| This is such a bad faith comment I don't know where to
| begin.
|
| Of course no reasonable person is saying that you have to
| compare against the worst thing, that's stupid- I was
| simply stating that I've seen things that have easily
| quantifiable returns.
|
| I'm comparing it against the 'nothing' that I would
| otherwise have.
|
| If you're comparing something then that's yours to
| compare, and this is a tool for doing that.
|
| if you're not running github or gitlab, what are you
| running?
|
| Maybe SVN+jira? or gogs? or gitea? what about teamcity?
|
| I'm not going to break down the cost savings and expenses
| of each of those, I'm just saying we're all already using
| services that have saved us many hours a week compared to
| those services not existing in any form.
|
| Its up to you to debate the 'many forms' a service takes,
| and remember that server hosting and human time is not
| free, so something self-hosted that requires some hours
| of time to maintain needs to be cost controlled for.
| projektfu wrote:
| Before git and mercurial I used CVS. It's pretty easy to
| set up a server if you have ssh or telnet access. For
| personal things I used RCS because it was integrated
| nicely in emacs. So I think one needs to at least compare
| it to those.
|
| RCS had almost no configuration required. It just wasn't
| easily shareable. So, going to git costs cycles for
| personal projects with the hope of a return from better
| management of sets of changes, etc.
| mattmanser wrote:
| How is it bad faith? You're wrong, he's right.
|
| You can run your own code repository, people did for
| decades, and took backups home. These days you could just
| send one to A.N.Y.Other cloud service.
|
| It doesn't take 5 hours per week, and if it takes 5 hours
| per year I'd be surprised.
| dijit wrote:
| It's bad faith because it speaks to the content of what I
| said and not the point.
|
| I am one of those people who managed code hosting
| repositories: but it's completely absurd to assume that
| code hosting was without any cost involved at all, and to
| remove all of the other integrated features too? No.
| Absurd.
|
| And anyway. The point was making is that we are already
| paying for services that save us a lot of time- they are
| of incredible value, and thus universal.
|
| And yes, you might not spend 5hrs a year on _just_ code
| hosting but code hosting and web view and merge request
| portals and issue tracking and so on- should those
| services not be provided somehow (or be provided by
| something like jira/swarm etc); would easily cost more
| than that in time.
|
| Hell, even running gitlab is an hour/w job just ensuring
| that backups are well tested and CI machines are purged,
| running updates and so on.
|
| It has a low cost, because it's just one person doing it,
| but the overall _point_ was that we already have some
| services that save us time and the parent was not
| speaking about them.
| moonsu wrote:
| > 4. From a financial point of view, I'm still paying the
| employee and the service, so either I need enough services and
| time savings that I can eliminate a job, or the service has to
| have positive ROI of its own.
|
| More likely, there's other work that the employee could be
| doing that will help your company grow
| [deleted]
| _pdp_ wrote:
| I like the idea.
|
| In 99% of the cases, I rather buy the service than develop it
| from scratch and support it long-term. Most consumer-facing
| services I've seen are relatively cheap. I only tend to develop
| existing things if I find there are some functionalities which
| either I cannot buy directly or they require a special setup that
| does not go well with security and other constraints.
| pagade wrote:
| First thing that came into mind:
|
| Is It Worth the Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/
| andersource wrote:
| The comic is actually referred to in the "about" section
| (question mark)
| Flimm wrote:
| This looks really cool. I put in some numbers for a service that
| I am considering, and the answer was the opposite of what I was
| intuitively expecting, which proves the need for something like
| this.
|
| Some feedback:
|
| - s/(one person)/(per person)/g - The "cover costs" section
| doesn't really make sense to me. For example, in one example, the
| breakdown says that I will burn $10000 extra, but that I will
| also cover costs with 23 hours of use. How does it know how much
| use it will take to cover costs? How does it know how much profit
| is generated per hour of use? Am I misunderstanding something? -
| It would be nice if the formula used was displayed in small text
| or in a tooltip or something.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I've been going back and forth on whether or not Hey is worth
| it for me. I really liked my trial, but $100 just feels like a
| high price. But according to this calculator I'd only have to
| value my free time at $3/hour to start "saving money".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What I got after messing with it a bit:
|
| The "cover costs" assumes your people will use the tool 8 hours
| a day. By the productivity you gain, it calculates how much you
| save in salary.
|
| The "free up an hour" also assumes your people will use the
| tools 8 hours a day.
|
| The "cover costs with" calculates how much your people must use
| the tool for it to eventually pay for itself. If it's larger
| than 8 hours, then the tool will never pay up.
| osel wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.
|
| For simplicity there are a whole host of underlying assumptions
| about what a work day is, what time spent means , etc.
|
| Explaining at least some of those assumptions is on my list of
| improvements, but there will never be a 'correct' answer in a
| generic form like this. It's more intended as a quick
| investigation/conceptual check.
| lukasm wrote:
| This is look at the cost, but what about value? Say, the total
| cost per hour (salary, insurance, benefits) is 50$, but how mych
| value does he/she create?
|
| I used to do this calculation with 2x assumption. Say, a new IDE
| plugin saves 100 engineering hours, so it's 50 000 in cost and
| another 50 000, because they spend time creating features.
|
| Is it a good assumption?
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