A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

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.…

We're in similar situations with a lot of our software vendors, NetSuite included. We've had maybe one vendor with which I've at least been reasonably happy (and, naturally, we're halfway through replacing that vendor with a different vendor that's significantly worse, because reasons). Same deal with nearly all my previous companies.

I guess it's normal for enterprise software vendors to be absolute trash.

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

#462

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

nkassis wrote: post #331

derefr wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call the paradigm in old-world militaries, where a lord would conscript their knights as officers during wartime; grant them "personal" budgets; and then each knight could take that budget and use it however they wished—by investing in technology, fortifications, or salaried subordinate hires, in any mix they liked, as long as it got the job done? Yes, it's "feudalism", but it's a specific part of feudali…

Yeah there many large companies work somewhat in this way and one of the side effects is that there is a lot of competition for resources and projects and a lot of duplication. Small fiefdom get formed and battles between groups happen for control and the winner is not always based on merit. Those organization often end up starting to get dysfunctional. In my view a larger version of that is the way the military is s…

I think you mean the F-35 project.

But yeah, the military's a good example of taking the worst of both worlds there.

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

#463

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #428

alharith wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for that? I am aware, according to the Brookings Institute, and world renowned economist Professor Raj Chetty, that it has been relatively flat for decades. Your parents wealth, and where you are born are the two biggest factors for economic mobility. Always has been, most likely always will be, so this isn't necessarily news or novel. So again, not sure divisive rhetoric and entrenching a feelin…

> Your parents wealth, and where you are born are the two biggest factors for economic mobility The entire point of "economic mobility" is as a measure of the extent to which that statement is not true . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_... (cites several survey papers and 1 or 2 originals) From a 2015 stanford report ( https://web.stanford.edu/~pmitnik/EconomicMobilityintheUnite... ): "App…

[deleted]

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

#464

Post by nkassis » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 11:17 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #462

nkassis wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there many large companies work somewhat in this way and one of the side effects is that there is a lot of competition for resources and projects and a lot of duplication. Small fiefdom get formed and battles between groups happen for control and the winner is not always based on merit. Those organization often end up starting to get dysfunctional. In my view a larger version of that is the way the military is s…

I think you mean the F-35 project. But yeah, the military's a good example of taking the worst of both worlds there.

Yes indeed.

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

#465

Post by dennis_jeeves » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #448

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All Democratic governments include a way to do exactly that - by definition. There's room for debate over how effective it actually is at removing underperformers compared to the free market, but saying it has no way to get rid of them is just untrue. You are either young and naive, or an idiot. Sorry, name calling is the only way to call out ignorance. Things simply don't work the way you think it does. In theory '…

You've broken several the site guidelines in this thread. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? Crossing into making an argument personal is especially not ok, and we have had to ask you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21797575 .

Dang, you may ban me if you wish. Sorry but my sense of what should be said appears to be fundamentally different from what is in the guidelines, or sensibilities of most people.

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

#466

Post by ownagefool » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

grosswait wrote: post #292

ownagefool wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, it's a problem on both sides of the fence.

Finding the balance is key.

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

#467

Post by specialist » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

tekknik wrote: post #459

specialist wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cited definition of complexity catastrophe for purposes of my thesis. What's your definition?

you also didn’t list any pros or cons of either. from my perspective, which is weekly travel for a very large company, moving back to paper is a nightmare. what do i do with my daily receipts? how do i submit this and hope to get reimbursed this year? having to manage this all on paper seems excruciatingly inefficiency

TLDR: Maybe I'm just railing against bureaucracy. I share my techno perfect dream at the end.

"you also didn’t list any pros or cons of either."

Thank you. You're right; I should do that. Long overdue.

Alas, I don't know how to do that.

The best I can do, at this time, is list examples of digital, paper, and hybrids which succeeded and failed. Try to divine RCAs. Then see if there are patterns.

I do have some initial guesses about best use of paper.

1- Organizational boundaries.

Like mediating communication between entities. (It slays me that scripts and referrals are done by fax, which might as well be black boxes, because the communication can fail silently.)

2- Legal stuff.

IDs, cash, voting (ballots), titles (property).

3- Short lived communication (semaphores), coordination, collaboration.

Lo-fi tools for brain storming, designing. Visible tools, like resource planning white boards.

"what do i do with my daily receipts?"

You say that like it's obvious. Of course we should design (engineer) away data entry.

Yet SAP Concur is still a thing, with wide adoption.

JIRA, ServiceNow, PagerDuty are crimes against humanity. Bending the work towards computers, instead of empowering humans.

I've gotten so much shit (from the larger orgs) the times I've moved my teams from heavy weight, labor intensive, error prone tools to lightweight lo-fi tools.

One stupid example: For weekly triage, we'd just print the bug list, and everyone (everyone) could vote, then cc copies of the list as needed. Voila, instant priorities.

The majority of push back is the style documented by Neil Postman's Technopoly. Some people can't wrap their heads around not using computers for everything. It's like the debate between ontologies and folksonomies. People who can't accept ambiguity vs people who can accept "good enough". (Just one over simplification of the psychology. I did pre-caveat by admitting my thinking is muddy.)

###

I've long dreamed of a technical solution.

Some kind of hybrid of HyperCard & wikis backed by version control.

New instances of a CRUD form (both UI and backing data) would just be cloned, a la prototype based classes. Every instance can be customized, a la live editing. Imprint both schemas and forms with a version token, so the system can support multiple variations, so that orgs and evolve processes incrementally (instead of outright cut-overs).

I recently made some progress on bridging the gap between persistence and UIs. I'm trying to reorient my life to resume work.

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

#468

Post by gmueckl » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 9:51 AM UTC

soonnow wrote: post #453

gmueckl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

I really like the idea of intentional loopholes. It is a great way ton conceptualize what I have been doing for a long time. In my opinion there is a certain feeling of satisfcation when feeling like the domain is modeled completely. Uncertainty or loopholes leave an itch to scratch. That's why people insist on modelling addresses. Adresses which are a fundamentally easy thing, should be easy to model. Like what, a h…

Addresses are hard. Off the top of my head: I live in Germany. Germany has states, but they are not part of postal addresses. A lot of US sites keep insisting on entering a state wven though that is wrong. There are tiny villages without street names. The name of the village substitutes for the street name. Maybe there are single house settlements with house numbers - I am not sure.

And then there is Mannheim, a city with no street names. This was originally a planned city where the city center has rectangular blocks numbered in a letter-number scheme. So there is e.g. a block L5. This refers to one side of the 4 adjacent streets. The other side of these streets is addreseed with L3, L5, etc... what his means is that you have addresss like O7 6 - a single letter and two numbers in a row. I bet that a lot if input validators for addresses trip over something like that.