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

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

acrossapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 468 posts

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

#411

Post by harrisonjackson »

crubier wrote: post #269
apk-d wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers here tend to earn roughly the same number , but in a different currency , which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We use Discord for communication, Gitlab…

Gitlab is a good example, we had to leave the free tier in order to get features that Gitlab specifically chose to be in the paid tier because their absence is a big blocker when you grow... So we pay $100/mo/seat on Gitlab. We also use at least 10 paid general-purpose tools that each fill a real need (we don't keep tools we don't use): - Notion for knowledge management - Airtable to manage operations data (not custo…

What do you use Gitlab for at the Gold tier that you don't get at Silver? The price jump for us was just too much but we did spring for Silver after dropping self-hosted Jenkins, self-hosted npm, Jira, and Github.

You might like this issue they just merged up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/37081

Roadmaps and single-level epics coming to Silver.

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

#412

Post by narrator »

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.…

>NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results.

IMHO, this describes any Oracle product. Usually what happens is a great little enterprise software company that gets a lot of happy customers gets bought by Oracle and then they start sucking the money out of everyone through nickel and dimeing on absolutely everything and make moving off the platform impossible and integrating with it difficult.

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

#413

Post by judge2020 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #342
judge2020 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. Cloudflare - maybe better safe than sorry since you need Pro for the WAF.

The $20/mo upgrade has more than that: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features You need to pay it just for Cloudflare SSL to work in all browsers which is pretty necessary if you use that feature at all. But the plan has various other goodies like more page rules, the "Polish" image compression, and rate limit rules.

SSL status isn't changed with the pro plan. If you want non-SNI clients to be able to visit your site, you need the Business plan which assigns IPs to your website that serve your SSL even without SNI present, but this is usually unnecessary as the non-SNI client base gets smaller every year. All of the major browsers support modern TLS and SNI so the free plan will work as long as you don't need to support users running XP or odd mobile browsers on 5+ year old Android.

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

#414

Post by mattrp »

fivre wrote: post #74
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…

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…

Toddlers you say.. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a senior leadership weekly meeting where someone thinks it would be a good idea to assign a senior executive the task of grouping together everyone’s phone plans and deciding policy on who gets the company phone, who gets reimbursed and who is sol.

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

#415

Post by mattrp »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #246
wpietri wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this corporate disdain for quality of work environment You may find the term "managerialism" handy. It's the belief that managers and execs are the central story of a company, that everything must flow through them, especially key decisions. And of course, that as the special people, they deserve outsized rewards. It's the dominant philosophy of US business, and although it seems eternal to us, it was invented in t…

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 great term for it. It’s maddening to see it in the enterprise and just downright depressing when it creeps into a startup - like why do you think you’re here? To give enterprise vendors half your ebitda?

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

#416

Post by Talanes »

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #396
wpietri wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really can't see the contradiction? I'll try again: Many fans of capitalism believe it superior to communism because free markets and high individual initiative produce better outcomes than central planning. However, they also believe in the awesomeness of corporations, which are generally run with central planning and no individual initiative. Is that clearer?

[flagged]

>When you have the govt doing central planning, there is no way to get rid of them when they under perform.

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.

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

#417

Post by nradov »

specialist wrote: post #406
nradov wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your points are irrelevant because it's simply impossible to use paper anymore for any but the smallest local businesses. Paper is too slow. Customers and employees would quickly leave.

Complexity catastrophes must be suffered because paper mediated processes are impractical?

Complexity catastrophes are rare and seldom actually catastrophic. It's easier to deal with occasional catastrophes than with the delays and inconveniences imposed by paper processes.

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

#418

Post by hugesmash »

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 cringe whenever I heard a CIO say, "It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers." While I do agree that there are tradeoffs between centralization vs decentralization, not sure that's the best way to frame the tension. Maybe rather than thinking inside the constraints, there are ways to find infrastructure/architecture to relieve them?

Going to leave these to consider: (guess from which book)

1 - Processes are supposed to protect people from Distractions and help them deliver their core objectives.

2 - IT is not merely a department, it is pervasive like electricity.

3 - In order to survive, the business and IT can’t make decisions exclusive of each other.

(IT = centralized function; "business" = functions being supported, including devs)

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

#419

Post by frankzinger »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #395
zbentley wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise. As with most things, the problem is complicated,…

The off the shelf solutions are designed to fit everyone, while bespoke solutions are designed just for you. A lot of the complexity in off the shelf software is that generality that might never be needed.

So true but very rarely expressed.

And often the features you need are much easier to implement than you might have expected and, due to the generalisation complexity, hacking on the off-the-shelf product often much more difficult.

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

#420

Post by tixocloud »

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 applaud you for sharing your story. With the rise of shadow IT, not enough of respect is given to CIOs and IT teams for making sure the entire company’s infrastructure doesn’t implode on its own. The main reason why we have so many data silos is because everyone is going out and buying software on their own specific to their needs without batting an eyelid to the enterprise. Vendors love the fact that they can circumvent IT just to get their solutions going and get your started without ever mentioning that a new data island is being created and work will be needed to bring it all back in-house.

Aside: can I ask for some advice on software requirements? We’re designing our solution to meet IT requirements and want to get under the skin of CIO concerns.

Post reply on HN