Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

ibj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 453 posts

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#281

Post by adwf »

owenmarshall wrote: post #211
phkahler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, total cost would be a better measure since there is no per-person cost to the SaaS provider. If you have 10,000 employees that's $100M per year in expenses. If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

> If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time. This is the kind of hubris I come to this site for.

Hubris is half of software development ;)

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#282

Post by jschwartzi »

paulddraper wrote: post #264
crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

Yeah, those numbers seem very suspicious. Cherry-picked maybe. Fifty dollars a month is a decently pricey subscription (like a lot more than Slack, JIRA, Lucidchart, Office, etc.), and you have twenty of those for every employee?

I've used specialized embedded system tools that cost $10,000/year per seat for tooling. Our QNX licenses were about $5,000 or $10,000/year alone. That's just to be able to run a piece of software. Autodesk tooling is $20 to 30k a year. Some of the more specialized tools cost six-figures.

So I guess if you're just doing some basic web development those numbers are suspect. But if you do hardware or embedded software projects $20,000/year per person is cheap.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#283

Post by [deleted] »

groby_b wrote: post #164
Retric wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve and other flat organizations arguably qualify. Various tiny small startups may qualify depending on what people mean by managers.

Valve is, by all accounts, a toxic cesspit that's ruled by various influential cabals. They still have a hierarchy, they just aren't explicit about it. At least for Medium, "Holacracy" pretty much imploded. Zsppos switched from it to an internal marketplace - which is, oddly, controlled by excecutives. Flat organizations beyond a certain size either move away from flatness officially, create unacknowledged hierarchy,…

[deleted]

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#284

Post by geogra4 »

swiley wrote: post #267
crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

MS office is probably one of them. Office 365 isn’t worth it but most people don’t seem to know that.

Right but MS has such a stranglehold that no business dare run without office. It's a shame that no one really has competition for them

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#285

Post by prostheticvamp »

swiley wrote: post #267
crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

MS office is probably one of them. Office 365 isn’t worth it but most people don’t seem to know that.

For whom is it not worth it? Software devs? Are they representative of the average white collar?

I couldn’t live without excel.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#286

Post by Retric »

groby_b wrote: post #164
Retric wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve and other flat organizations arguably qualify. Various tiny small startups may qualify depending on what people mean by managers.

Valve is, by all accounts, a toxic cesspit that's ruled by various influential cabals. They still have a hierarchy, they just aren't explicit about it. At least for Medium, "Holacracy" pretty much imploded. Zsppos switched from it to an internal marketplace - which is, oddly, controlled by excecutives. Flat organizations beyond a certain size either move away from flatness officially, create unacknowledged hierarchy,…

The video game sector is unstable and toxic. IMO, Valve compares favorably to other video game companies as for one thing it’s still in business.

Flat organizations are unusual, but survive about as well as other similar organizations. The difference is when a giant reorganization/buyout etc hits, they more obviously change into something else.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#287

Post by digsy »

davidajackson wrote: post #175
taleodor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Unfortunately, way too often I see execs saying "that's too expensive, we just have to do it manually" instead of using good tool. Then what happens is somebody making $100+/hour would spend several hours to do the job that would be covered by a tool that costs under $50/month.

Someone should build a webpage that does this: 1. Enter salary of engineer. 2. Enter cost per engineer of product (subscription, one time, etc.). 3. Enter required minutes to make worth your time (setup per employee can be factored in). This may already exist, but if it doesn't it could be a useful tool for Saas companies. Something you could drop into emails to potential customers ("see how much you would save"). Wo…

I have a spreadsheet at work that does this for manual tasks. It calculates minutes to perform the task X # employees X yearly frequency of task.

Once I've plugged in the values, I go back and ask if we really want to spend 30 hours a year updating intranet employee profiles or if we should use that time to fix some bugs or code a new feature.

Its quite effective to pushing back on unneeded tasks.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#288

Post by a1369209993 »

nradov wrote: post #249
phkahler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, total cost would be a better measure since there is no per-person cost to the SaaS provider. If you have 10,000 employees that's $100M per year in expenses. If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

Read up on the history Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3). The team worked for 7 years and although they achieved some technical goals they never managed to deliver a working payroll system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens... Payroll is harder than it looks due to all the edge cases. For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions incl…

> For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates?

By issuing a error and demanding that a human deal with it. Obviously.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#289

Post by a1369209993 »

genghisjahn wrote: post #93
papito wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most business in the United States is done despite the management, not because of it.

Where’s the list of awesome companies that succeed without managers?

I don't know, where's the list of people who are healthy without disease-causing bacteria? (Have you washed your hands today?)

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#290

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ckdarby wrote: post #234
XCSme wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the option of buying self-hosted products and installing them on your own server. The setup time is usually the same, but you only pay $5/mo for the server and maybe $100 one time for the product, instead of paying $100/mo for the service. This is also multiplied by X, where X is the number of subscriptions you have.

No. Please do not suggest this ever. Every company I've worked at and that has gone with self-hosted products have lost more money than paying the subscription. Self-hosted nearly never gets upgraded because there's no budget and it can always be cut from the budget because it'll keep functioning. Corp IT who usually get stuck managing these become the gatekeepers. They have nearly zero incentive to upgrade because t…

Is the issue with staying on an old version security, or lack of new features?

Because if it's just features, then maybe the features actually aren't worth the cost of an upgrade, if no one feels incentivized to do so.

Your anecdote about Jira tooling feels like the company not doing adequate research before hiring a time. (In other words, they should have considered all options—what is the cost of upgrading versus building tooling?)

Post reply on HN