181–190 of 453 posts
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Java, PHP, MySQL, Postgresql, OpenSSL, Linux come to mind.
Perhaps this is an effect of learning to program in the 2010s, but paying for a programming language (Java, PHP) sounds crazy to me. Do people actually do this?
It seems to me companies should instead invest in open source alternatives. They could pay less, funding the development of open source alternatives and everyone wins. Blender is a good example of this.
Just doing the math, telling your engineers to spend $10 worth of their time every month contributing to an open source alternative is worthless. Building something reasonable is going to be a lot more expensive than what they currently spend on the software.
If you are already spending >$200K per employee, spending another $10K to make them even 10% more productive is a bargain.
How much does it cost you for Jetbrains? How many technical books is that? Is in worth that many books a year for a decent tool?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java, PHP, MySQL, Postgresql, OpenSSL, Linux come to mind.
Perhaps this is an effect of learning to program in the 2010s, but paying for a programming language (Java, PHP) sounds crazy to me. Do people actually do this?
So many companies try to force you onto SaaS. Products that you previously had a perpetual license for are now SaaS only if you want to upgrade. O365 is the only SaaS platform that makes sense where I work. But we have a bunch of SaaS services because that is the only way the product is offered. I hate SaaS.
This from the article: According to a recent analysis of more than 30 million transactions, Zylo—a local firm that helps its customers track and manage software subscriptions—found enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software. So, for every 100 employees, companies are spending $1 million on software subscriptions. So what would an IT department, physical plant,…
Yeah, ok, you are assuming SaaS replaces high performance in house applications... That's usually not the case. SaaS usually does not replace in house machines, and it usually does not deal with high performance applications.
Github SaaS - source repository, build servers, integration infrastructure.
Quickbooks SaaS - replaces DB server, DBA
Google Enterprise - replaces Web server, mail server, DNS server, chat server, and NAS devices.
Solidworks SaaS - replaces simulation resources with cloud resources.
Slack SaaS - chat servers, administration of same.
There is an IT concept, SUDs, which is short for "Servers Under Desks." That is a situation where an employee sets up a server do do something and it "lives" under their desk because they don't have an official place to put it. And then it becomes mission critical without anyone knowing and there is a big fire drill when something disrupts the flow (employee leaves, server crashes/fails, scaling requirement isn't met, Etc)
So many companies try to force you onto SaaS. Products that you previously had a perpetual license for are now SaaS only if you want to upgrade. O365 is the only SaaS platform that makes sense where I work. But we have a bunch of SaaS services because that is the only way the product is offered. I hate SaaS.
Other things I hated:
1. yearly support contracts that were basically a necessity to purchase alongside (very expensive) enterprise software.
2. working at companies that had ancient versions of software running, and needing to dig up old matching documentation (when possible)
3. paying a large sum for a piece of software and then being "stuck" with it due to the investment being already made
4. the opaque sales processes that surrounded getting up & running with any piece of software
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Has Valve done anything noteworthy in the last 10 years besides milking the Steam store? Their half-baked console seemed like an attempt to do more of the former.
I know you are trying to be snarky but Valve has accomplished a hell of a lot more than most startups ever will. They are far from perfect (hell, they’re known for bugs and their famously poor timelines, and I heard their game Artifact was not good,) but it’s pretty bizarre to suggest they do nothing. Maintaining Steam alone is huge. It’s hard to find a platform with more vigorous fanboys for good reason. But that al…
Most Startups are at least trying to change the status quo.
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I have yet to encounter a manager who motivates me to get up and find a way to eat that day. Just because they are there doesn’t mean the achievements are due to them. There have been a number of attempts, tens of millions of dollars spent on one study alone, trying to quantify what technologies and people generate value. The meta-conclusion considering all the studies I know of (traveling and not looking them up), i…
Hm. Allocating credit for achievements is a tricky thing. Management is necessary to allocate resources (including labor) efficiently at scale, but it comes with overhead. As such, at smaller companies, startups, small businesses, the overhead of management can be outsized, the pain felt acutely when compared relatively to the actual output of ICs and such. At larger companies, the massive cadre of management which i…
A healthy society takes a village. IMO there’s plenty of literal history to show isolating a minority from the demands the rest of us face is ripe for abuse at scale.
One person did not invent languages, lay down the highways and invent computers.
All the people we hold up relied not just on the historical invention to push them forward but society giving them space and not killing them. Every individual inventor is outnumbered.
IMO that space to be and do is what we should optimize for. Not a tether to tradition of emotionally wanking off a handful over what is ultimately a linguistic twist on an idea that was discovered/defined collectively
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IRC for Slack was one that happened at a company I worked at.
There were still internal costs related to running IRC though, assuming you weren't paying some provider to do it for you... not large internal costs, but I don't think on a radically different scale from Slack considering that you could also view a Slack subscription as covering a client with a lot more features than a typical IRC setup (sure you could run a web client, bouncers, services, but that's all increasing…