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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?

#71

Post by groby_b »

projektfu wrote: post #57
groby_b wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#72

Post by afarrell »

glaberficken wrote: post #7
glenjamin wrote: post #3

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"

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.

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/

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#73

Post by dzonga »

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 ?

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#74

Post by osel »

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!

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#75

Post by osel »

glaberficken wrote: post #9
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

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

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#76

Post by osel »

glenjamin wrote: post #3

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"

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#77

Post by osel »

Flimm wrote: post #15

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 w…

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#78

Post by osel »

drapery wrote: post #59

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 employ…

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.

Re: Show HN: Is It Worth the Cost?

#80

Post by mattmanser »

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'…

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.

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