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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?

#61

Post by projektfu »

dijit wrote: post #23
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…

> 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…

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?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#62

Post by dijit »

jonfw wrote: post #52
dijit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#63

Post by hedora »

falcolas wrote: post #37
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…

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 mana…

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#64

Post by ponker »

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#65

Post by cmbell715 »

ori_b wrote: post #46
jeremymcanally wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”).

Did you spend 5 hours per week per employee managing permissions in git?

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#66

Post by jeremymcanally »

ori_b wrote: post #46
jeremymcanally wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”).

Did you spend 5 hours per week per employee managing permissions in git?

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#67

Post by projektfu »

dijit wrote: post #62
jonfw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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'…

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#69

Post by [deleted] »

osel wrote: post #2

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

[deleted]
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