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A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

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Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#231

Post by wpietri »

calmworm wrote: post #155
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #33

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…

Your CFO got sold ... twice. Concur and NetSuite are both enterprise level software that a company with 50 FTEs does not need. NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results. I dealt with a very similar situation, in which a project manager("VP") talked our owner into using NS, but it was over $100k/year and commitments were 2 years per seat at something like $5k. He ALSO wanted to do the roll out himself.…

Weirdly, almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat next to somebody at a wedding who had an almost-identical story about cleaning up after an SAP rollout, but all of the numbers had an extra zero or two. It amazes me that what the SaaS shift appears to have achieved is that now much smaller companies can get stuck in the same "solve everything" money pit.

But I guess the fundamental problem hasn't changed: executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work. With no regard for actual operational efficiency, and no need to hold themselves to the ROI standards they'd demand of others.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#232

Post by GordonS »

jessaustin wrote: post #146
GordonS wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where this totally falls down is where that committee becomes a full-time position, and the members stop doing actual dev work, becoming more and more out of touch with reality as time passes. This was the case at an engineering company I worked with for several years. The committee, or "enterprise architects" as they called themselves, became too far removed from the trenches, and the devs viewed them as sitting in…

sharepoint site IME, this right here should have seen the entire committee fired.

At the time, sharepoint was fairly new In Microsoft's portfolio (IIRC, they bought out another company), and it really was horrendous.

Thankfully it's a lot nicer these days - but I still wouldn't use it as a platform on which to build a web app (yes, we were forced, under great duress to do that - and the result was as awful as you'd expect).

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#234

Post by GordonS »

afarrell wrote: post #154
GordonS wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a few simple rules would help - you don't need complex procedures and forms, it can be as simple as "if you want to buy new software, ask the CIO or CTO, and in most cases they'll say yes/no on the spot". I can't help but think this is a symptom of being awash with VC cash - I can't imagine this happening in a bootstrapped business.

Note that the phrase "ask the CIO or CTO" hides an "obvious" skill: Concisely make plain the cost vs. value -- grounded in the CIO/CTO's understanding of value.

I think it's fair that if you want to spend company money, you need to justify it, especially so if it's on something that will be used by a whole team or across the whole company.

At a smaller company that values its devs, there hopefully shouldn't be too much ceremony around this, unless it's a particularly large spend.

But at larger companies, yes, you're likely going to have to know how to make your case in a more formal way, and get involved in company politics (ugh).

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#235

Post by wolco »

oarsinsync wrote: post #83
wolco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Sublime Text 2 forever. https://www.sublimetext.com/2 Sublime Text 2 may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation.

You can use use it forever without a license, but you shouldn't. There are lots of honour based / social contracts that essentially function because enough of us abide by them. If enough people do not, they go away. Or as the saying goes, "this is why we can't have nice things."

So someone should uninstall the program and download a true open source product like vscode. Because using it by the terms listed on the download page is breaking a social contract. If we don't no one will offer a free editor again?

- There is a reason they offered a free unlimited trial. They were unknown and by offering it for free they increased popularity, increased business / education licenses sold. By me switching to another editor I stop telling people I use that editor my company stops purchasing that license. We all lose. Nevermind version 3 doesn't have that wording, so version 2 can be seen as a gateway product to onboard developers into version 3.

- Even though vscode is open source by supporting that editor you are supporting big microsoft over a much smaller company. Long term this hurts small developers more. I think open source can hurt small players when used by larger corps trying to get you to buy into there paid ecosystem.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#236

Post by ggregoire »

bad_user wrote: post #151

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup: 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype 2. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder 3. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a hig…

Also, I wonder how much time they waste switching between tools and managing them (accounts, settings & preferences, payments, upgrading plans, checking release notes, news & other notification emails, etc).

Don’t using 28 productivity tools make you less productive eventually?

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#237

Post by jschwartzi »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #210
emj wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the host has at least tried the conference solution before the meeting it is usually ok for us, but that quickly become a specialized task that only one person care about, when s/he is away there is a high chance of wasted time.

I think the rule is that the other conferencing system always works better than the current system until you buy it. Then they all seem to fail :) Right now we are using MS Teams which so far has been reliable. I am just waiting for the day when it becomes flaky too.

Teams actually works well for us too. My only complaint is about startup time and the consistent 2 or 3 second hangs that happen when I'm typing things sometimes.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#238

Post by ghettoimp »

noir_lord wrote: post #49
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #33

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…

I hear you, I work for a large manufacturing company as a lead engineer (household name in the UK) and this complete lack of agreement between teams on how to do things results in a colossal amount of churn/wastage between "new shiny" and "already working". Lots of "Lets move X to Y" which never gets completed then someone addes "Z" and now you have 3 ways of doing basically everything. Worse is our documentation (wh…

This rings so, so true.

At my very large company, in my particular department, any one trouble ticket may bounce between

(1) a Java ticketing app (2) a web/email ticketing system (3) a Jira issue, or (4) a Gitlab issue, or (5) a company-wide issue tracker

Other groups (e.g., customer service) have their own, completely separate systems besides the above.

Some development tasks are tracked with an issue tracker. Others are planned out in Confluence or Jira, per the whims of each team. We have literally 5 different chat "solutions," with various factions preferring each. Every day it seems someone brings online yet another script that sends out helpful emails. My count is around 16k since Jan 1.

The result of all of this is a sprawling, utterly insane flood of useless noise that everyone ignores.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#239

Post by gbourne »

vidyesh wrote: post #71
filipsch wrote: post #51

If you’re using free Heroku dynos, the first visitor in a while will experience long load times because the dyno has to be spun up. This is a pretty bad experience. I’d spend the 7 dollars each month to make sure your dyno is always up.

https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/

Heroku limits the number of hours you can have up - 550 a month ( https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours ). So if you have a system with real users, you really should just pay the $7 a month.
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