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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

#291

Post by DangitBobby »

afarrell wrote: post #119
fivre wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The individuals in aggregate may be toddlers, but unfortunately the C-suite as individuals are often also toddlers, at least vis a vis their responsibilities. Tasked with providing IT infrastructure that works for the company, they seem to largely shirk their responsibility and choose IT infrastructure that best serves them, the needs of others be damned. CIOs will seemingly gladly choose something that provides a go…

Part of the problem here is that there is a balance to be struck with these sorts of things: Cost, User experience, Mange-ability, and time spent shopping around rather than just going with the industry-default or one with the best sales-team. Responsible decision-makers have to make trade-offs. When you say > Reports...are roundly ignored That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost…

Is it the report's job to bend over backwards to prepare a series of easily digestible info-graphics to convince the manager that the decisions they've made are bad? Or is it the manager's job to follow up on decisions they've made to see how they turn out, and to investigate to see if reports of eye-gouging are substantiated? In theory, the person whose eyeballs were affected by your decisions already have a litany of responsibilities that do not cease to exist when someone makes decisions that rock a company to it's very core. Maybe instead of shlepping the responsibility of identifying the consequences of their actions downstream, they should exhibit a little initiative and attempt to take a role in evaluating whether the decision they've made was the right one for the team.

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

#292

Post by grosswait »

ownagefool wrote: post #60
Tainnor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the problem with the "IT department dictates all the choices because the devs are stupid" approach is that it takes ownership away from the devs, therefore leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I can't be trusted to make technology decisions for the system I know about (and the IT department knows nothing about), then why should I care about delivering the best possible product? Sorry, I've seen exactly that…

I think both view points are true. - In orgs that don't trust dev typically have significantly less understanding of dev, and in my experience have really poor security postures. Everything is a slow manual process decided by people who don't understand apps or automation. - In orgs that trust dev too much, you usually get a federated architecture that doesn't make any sense from a strategy point of you. Some teams a…

Regarding your first point about security, I see the opposite on a weekly basis. Devs, especially in startups, make secure technology decisions, but in a very narrow and entirely technical scope that essentially encompasses "their world". Once induced to see the larger picture either due to a compromised system, or table top exercises that include the rest of the business, they and leadership start to realize they've had a false sense of security.

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

#293

Post by pault »

travisjungroth wrote: post #268
afarrell wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem here is that there is a balance to be struck with these sorts of things: Cost, User experience, Mange-ability, and time spent shopping around rather than just going with the industry-default or one with the best sales-team. Responsible decision-makers have to make trade-offs. When you say > Reports...are roundly ignored That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost…

You’re giving advice on how to be persuasive, and it’s rare I find comments as off-putting as yours.

I found it thoughtful and of much greater effort than your dismissal.

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

#294

Post by ineedasername »

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…

Yeah, some of this stuff is going to happen and it's a hassle dealing with it. However, and this may not have been the case with you but has happened where I work: If no one is satisfied with the tools they use then maybe the selection process isn't properly taking user needs into account. You, for example, may find Zoom's meeting ID/participant ID system onerous, but if the bulk of your users need or want something else, there's a problem: Smooth comunication with potential clients through a tool they're comfortable with is rather important. Personally, I can't stand the parade of different conference tools that require their own browser plugins or installed clients or single-use download client etc.

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

#295

Post by hef19898 »

afarrell wrote: post #255
ryandrake wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a skill like any other, and requires study and practice. There is a reason why half of pilot training is checklists and drilling procedures until they are permanently encoded into your muscle memory.

Right. But I often see people ask "how can I learn to X" and get advice like "Go do Y. It will force you to X". But jumping into to the situation unprepared is not how pilots learn skill X. They learn it through particular methods of study and practice.

Yeah, true. Frugality is a nice thing to have learned. And I agree, you don't learn it by bootstrapping your company. Rather your company will likely go bankrupt if you didn't learn it before.

If you have the basics already, so, bootstrapping forces you to build up that. No guarantees, so.

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

#296

Post by erikpukinskis »

tinza123 wrote: post #170

IMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible, because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets funded and has more resources.

On the flip side of that, we use three react libraries at my job: react-table, react-dates, and react-select.

If we had been OK just using whatever styles they gave us, it would have been fine. But we have a designer who designs how everything is supposed to look. And even the "style-less" react components have been a nightmare. Just a constant train of bugs to fix, and they still barely function.

It would have been way faster to start from scratch, in my opinion. This has all been over 6 months, so it's not like there was some initial payoff period either.

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

#297

Post by danpalmer »

rossdavidh wrote: post #252
danpalmer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of the reason why I like working in a B2C company. B2C has it's own set of problems, but we aren't dependent on a small group of unprofitable companies. One thing that's been really interesting is seeing how many SaaS tech companies products just don't work for us at all, for example Intercom. Intercom is a great product, but all of their pricing is centered around how many people use your site. If you h…

You may be correct, but I'm just throwing out the idea that perhaps, the needs of these two different kinds of companies are so different that it is a good idea to specialize in one or the other, else you become mediocre at serving either one? But the flaw in my logic is that the one, sometimes evolves into the other.

No this is a very good point, being B2B serving B2B means likely lower traffic and different concerns to being a B2B serving B2C companies.

My counterpoint would be that the B2B companies don't always seem to recognise this, but it's not to say they haven't internally decided not to pursue that market. I think it's a shame if they have, it's a very large market!

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

#298

Post by edanm »

rossdavidh wrote: post #254
edanm wrote: post #29

You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating. This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of all inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.

You don't normally have to do security reviews of your cups and plates, is one difference that comes to mind.

True and a good point. Though you also don't have to do security reviews for most saas's, just third party libraries that you add to your product.

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

#299

Post by gmueckl »

specialist wrote: post #280
wpietri wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Maybe we'd all do better de-digitizing our processes. Return to paper. -- I've been struggling to articulate a thesis, for way too long. But here it goes. Complexity catastrophe occurs when cost of change outweighs benefit. Or simply can't be done in time to make a difference. Whereas databasization makes processes inflexible, humans are relatively more flexible. Like being able to make notes on forms, or quickly mod…

One of the first things I got told about databases is that you may build the most beautiful database schema for the domain, but it will never be able to be complete.

For the applications that I designed so far, that meant that I always made room for intentional loopholes like free-form comments or ways to override hardcoded processes. It is not 100% perfect and foolproof, but it made using these applications a lot less painful in practice.

A wholesale return to paper is like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. It is really about how rigid a process can become without becoming a barrier or burden.

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

#300

Post by chapium »

wpietri wrote: post #250
ibeckermayer wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen another user on HN who grew up in the USSR call it “soviet capitalism”. A friend of mine also recognized it in this 2015 article (see footnote 1): https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/obamacare

That's a good description. I'll also talk about "corporate feudalism", where you have the Duke of Engineering fighting with the Duke of Product, and the King/CEO must mediate the conflicts. The peasants, of course, are basically property of their various nobles. But I really like "soviet capitalism", as it points at a key contradiction. Somehow, fans of capitalism, which maximizes surplus value by freeing individuals…

At the end of the day, everything is a tree.
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