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Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

isitworththecost.com

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Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#51

Post by groby_b »

projektfu wrote: post #13

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…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#52

Post by jonfw »

dijit wrote: post #49
lucideer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#53

Post by throwaway43234 »

lucideer wrote: post #34
dijit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> 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?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#54

Post by KerryJones »

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#55

Post by drapery »

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#57

Post by projektfu »

groby_b wrote: post #51
projektfu wrote: post #13

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…

> 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 gi…

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#58

Post by rachelbythebay »

georgyo wrote: post #21
irjustin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decisio…

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 som…

Do you work at Lyft?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#59

Post by drapery »

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?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#60

Post by hedora »

irjustin wrote: post #19
georgyo wrote: post #10

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…

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 decisio…

> 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.

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