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I work in the public sector, our most expensive resource is the people who work for us. If you have 8 people spending two years building a toolchain, that mean

by jaabe 8y ago

I work in the public sector, our most expensive resource is the people who work for us. If you have 8 people spending two years building a toolchain, that means your tool chain cost 65712 hours to setup. In order to be worthwhile, it needs to save you more than 65712 hours on development and operations. If it fails to do that, then you’ve wasted tax payer money.

jacobolus 8y ago
The problem is that there are at least 5 or 6 different parts of your original comment that are completely lacking in context / elaboration, so that readers are left guessing about what you are trying to say. I don’t know what “their setup”, “making their toolchain and business processes work”, “the stackoverflow setup”, etc. mean, or what I am supposed to be comparing. If you can quantify, e.g. “they spent 16 man-years working on a development process that saves no more than two weeks for each new project, and they only have a few dozen projects to use it on”, then I would have a much clearer idea of the scope, even if I still didn’t know what this process was. On the flip side, if this new process makes the difference between a high-impact future project succeeding vs. failing or getting started vs. never getting tried, it might still be worth it. * * * At a higher level, having people spend some amount of their professional time on public-facing work that helps more than themselves or their local organization isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing. If many organizations and individuals spend time volunteering their time to larger-scale open projects, it can end up as a multiplier for everyone’s effort. All modern software projects (not to mention every other type of project) are built on millions of man-years of effort by huge numbers of people, most of whom didn’t recover much if any of the value they created.

by jaabe 8y ago

jacobolus 8y ago

The problem is that there are at least 5 or 6 different parts of your original comment that are completely lacking in context / elaboration, so that readers are left guessing about what you are trying to say. I don’t know what “their setup”, “making their toolchain and business processes work”, “the stackoverflow setup”, etc. mean, or what I am supposed to be comparing. If you can quantify, e.g. “they spent 16 man-years working on a development process that saves no more than two weeks for each new project, and they only have a few dozen projects to use it on”, then I would have a much clearer idea of the scope, even if I still didn’t know what this process was. On the flip side, if this new process makes the difference between a high-impact future project succeeding vs. failing or getting started vs. never getting tried, it might still be worth it. * * * At a higher level, having people spend some amount of their professional time on public-facing work that helps more than themselves or their local organization isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing. If many organizations and individuals spend time volunteering their time to larger-scale open projects, it can end up as a multiplier for everyone’s effort. All modern software projects (not to mention every other type of project) are built on millions of man-years of effort by huge numbers of people, most of whom didn’t recover much if any of the value they created.