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One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of peopl

• fjsolwmv 7y ago
  Are you sure your scripts and web server costs less than Tableau?
  • infinite8s 7y ago
    Probably not. From his comment I doubt he's even used Tableau (and I say this as a programmer who worked on something similar - https://perspective.finos.org https://perspective.finos.org - and yet I still find myself turning to tableau pretty often).
  • himlion 7y ago
    Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.
    • finaliteration 7y ago
      > Way more than a few weeks of dev time. Except it's not just a few weeks of dev time that makes up the overall cost. Consider infrastructure, maintenance, updates, support, training, etc,. Those things start to add up and you don't get the benefit of scale/community if you do it on your own. There's also the opportunity cost of building your own system when you could buy something existing and use that time to work on other things.
      • himlion 7y ago
        True I'll give you it depends on the situation and might indeed be the better option. For a startup I wouldn't recommend it at least
    • selectodude 7y ago
      Tableau is $850/yr per seat. Very expensive might be overstating things a little.
      • stewbrew 7y ago
        So how many seats are needed to hire somebody who creates a custom shiny + R app that does exactly what you want? How big is the average company that makes use of tableau etc.? Let's do the math ...
        • cycrutchfield 7y ago
          It’s 2019. Are we seriously still trying to argue that homegrown solutions are overall more cost effective than SaaS? Are we still of the opinion that developing tooling outside of your company’s core competencies is somehow adding value?
          • spookthesunset 7y ago
            Absolutely. There are tons of people I encounter every single day that seem to think it is cheaper to build everything inhouse. I think it comes from a complete misunderstanding of how business delivers value coupled with RMS-like distrust of anything they cannot completely crack the lid open and mess around with. Mostly the former, some of the later.
          • stewbrew 7y ago
            Well it's probably a question of perspective and problem domain. Also my main concern is precision and correctness. Quite often you can choose between (1) customized tools that achieve almost what you want them to do, but often the people who implemented or customized them didn't fully understand the problem and did things wrong without anyone noticing for a long time, or (2) custom tools that do exactly what you want, that were tested by somebody who cares.
    • capkutay 7y ago
      Ah of course. Just a few few weeks of dev time to build the same thing a multi-billion dollar company sells. Then after a few weeks of dev time you find out you're missing about 80% of the features that makes tableau useful. After that few weeks your manager asks you how the project is going and you just mutter something about how you should probably just buy looker or tableau.
      • cycrutchfield 7y ago
        Nah, these sorts of folks are far too obdurate and prideful to ever willingly admit defeat. More likely they would keep telling the manager that they just need a few more weeks time to finish it while they frantically keep rolling that Sisyphean boulder up the hill.
  • hadlock 7y ago
    We were getting ready to do a tableau api/integration with our software and the licensing came out to about $100k for two server dev licences and six client licenses.
• kyllo 7y ago
  To put a finer point on it, they'll pay a lot of money for tools that require less-skilled labor to operate. They will gladly spend a lot of money on Tableau to avoid paying the salary premium to have "those who program" build them an analytics system. It costs much less to hire business analysts who don't program (aside from SQL).
  • hinkley 7y ago
    Now if they just taught business analysts how statistics work. If I had a dollar for every time someone showed me a wrongheaded graph they were using to make business decisions, I could retire.
    • kyllo 7y ago
      There are varying degrees of skill and competence in business analytics just like there are in software development.
• greenyoda 7y ago
  > I can do the same thing with some scripts... I thought that the point of Tableau was to provide a tool that end-users (who can't program) could use to interactively explore their data. That's not something you can replicate with a bunch of scripts.
  • bllguo 7y ago
    I can see how Tableau would be great if you are in a situation where you can have business guys creating their dashboards and exploring their data. The issue in practice is almost always getting the data in a workable state so that you can manipulate it easily in Tableau. In my experience in smaller and mid-sized places, Tableau tasks get punted to analytics and data science, because they are needed anyway to get and transform the data in the first place. And these people usually prefer and are capable of using more technical tools than Tableau. I know I would rather use Shiny or Dash. Maybe that's not a difficult problem in larger corps.
• oarabbus_ 7y ago
  >is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. Is that fully accurate, though? Where does that leave data scientists / data analysts? I know SQL very well, and I know python's data stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, plotly, seaborn, various stats toolkits). I have a strong understanding of the "programming ecosystem" i.e. concepts, terms, definitions, and so on. I understand (basic) computer architecture, I've used and am familiar with (basic) shell/terminal, and services like Docker/Heroku on the command line, and can certainly use GUI cloud tools for AWS, GCP, etc. I can read and understand code and how systems fit together. I've worked alongside engineers of all types. But I'm not a software engineer. I don't tell people I "program" because my strongest skill is SQL and generally people do not refer to that as "programming".
  • souterrain 7y ago
    I’d instead use the distinction “those who can sling code when necessary” versus “those who cannot/will not sling code.”
  • in9 7y ago
    you are a programmer. At least in my book. You may not be experienced in architecting software projects, or writing highly maintainable code, or dealing with niche frameworks and tools (gui frameworks, network systems). But that is just a lack of training, interest, opportunity, etc...
    • oarabbus_ 7y ago
      This is nice to hear. Truth be told, I'd like to get some professional software engineering experience. The problem for me is: 1. It's hard to get considered to be a SWE in the first place when your job titles are more in the realm of data analyst. They'll toss out my resume for a fresh grad, much less someone with experience, without a second thought. 2. If I were to make the switch I'd likely have to start at level 0 on the scale ladder. I've already career changed once into tech, and at this point I do not wish to "reset" my experience another time
      • 7y ago
• kfk 7y ago
  Wait until a manager asks you to do something that Salesforce was not built for and IT tells you a back office resource can do it. None of those of the shelves enterprise solutions just work, they all need some degree of customization and integration. I am struggling sometimes to justify the cost of a vendor solution + customization versus just rolling out my own or an open source one that can be more easily built on top of.
  • initself 7y ago
    Everything you write, I cheer. Massive customization, and then you are bound by this broke ass Object model in which to get it all done, between Apex and VisualForce nauseating crap. I don't want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right to do write database driven web pages.
• oarabbus_ 7y ago
  >well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get a tool like Periscope Data/Looker/Tableau. I mean this gently, but you likely underestimate the complexity of a reliable reporting/analytics infrastructure. Think about it this way - these tools are either collaborated on by a large open-source talent pool, or are created by teams of dedicated software engineers just as talented as you. I've worked with quite a few companies in an analytics consulting type role, and your "I can do the same thing with scripts" statement is one I've heard countless times. The long-term maintenance costs and technical debt (and "rigidity cost") of rolling-your-own analytics far outweighs the cost of a true analytics platform. If you decide to roll-your-own anyway, look at tools like DBT and Airflow to reduce long-term maintenance costs.
  • capkutay 7y ago
    > that's a massive waste of your time and effort. Yeah I work at a company in the analytics space and see that all the time. It peaks the curiosity of people who are software developers (yet their core competency at their job is something else). They think its a fun work side-project and go after it. Write some python scripts to do ETL and process the data...make a backend with pg, a web server, then do charts in d3.js. A year later they have a bunch of nice demos to their bosses but nothing that they can actually use in production because it crashes, there's no UI for interactive queries, no reports for people in the business groups, no user management etc. Then they drop it because they're busy with their actual job. So the cost of that engineers time to do something that didn't work was about $20-30k over a year. While the product they could actually use in production was around the same price.
    • usepgp 7y ago
      just an FYI, the word you're looking for is 'piques' not 'peaks'
    • 7y ago
• cycrutchfield 7y ago
  And this attitude right here perfectly exemplifies “NIH syndrome”. Beware if you work somewhere and a colleague suggests that some homegrown hacked-together non-feature-complete solution would be competitive and “cost less” than the professional product.
• lazyasciiart 7y ago
  And those who can program are split into those who can estimate work and those who think they could replace a product like tableau with a few scripts.
• dvdhsu 7y ago
  As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (https://tryretool.com https://tryretool.com) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly. If you guys have any feedback... I'd really appreciate it. We're just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!
  • luckydata 7y ago
    so you're rebuilding Visual Basic in react.
    • jtwaleson 7y ago
      Do you mean that as a good or a bad thing? VB was fantastic to many people!
      • luckydata 7y ago
        absolutely a good thing. It was a light hearted jab at the description that made it sound like something completely original and never tried before :) I hope he does well, those tools are super useful.
  • enlyth 7y ago
    I would have to delve deeper to give actually useful feedback, but I wanted to say from a presentational point of view, it looks great, well done for putting something like this together
• nitwit005 7y ago
  If you just want a chart based on a DB query, then yes, it's a waste of time and money. The value of a lot of these products is that they have query/charting builders, which takes a lot more effort to implement. These days a lot of business aren't willing to accept analytics being controlled by a single person or team, as they're used to anyone being able to do their own custom thing.
• fullshark 7y ago
  Yep. UX is by far the most underrated aspect of product development by engineers.
• yingw787 7y ago
  Yea no this is wayyyy underestimating the costs of data engineering. I can tell you from my very limited experience some queries I've seen, on some systems and some datasets, have estimated TTLs in YEARS -- and that's the difference between companies that invest in tooling and infrastructure (and big O analysis during system design) and those that don't. And you will invest a good deal of effort and time and money before you realize it, it's like the perfect ambush. Never start a land war in Russia, and never neglect your data infrastructure if data is in any way a key business differentiator/fundamental in your market.
• tommyderami 7y ago
  I actually felt the same way about Salesforce until about a year ago when my company bought it. It certainly has a duplo blocks side that let's non technical users do complex things (aka Excel) but their backed is extensible through a language that is more or less Java for custom handlers/queries/etc and they are switching their front end to W3C compliant web components for developer maintainability after getting burned by rolling their own front end framework in the early angular 1 era. They have super tight integration with heroku postgres dbs (because they own them) and have some other best technical tricks up their sleeve to the point that I my opinion has changed quite a bit.
• mbesto 7y ago
  > Those who program and those who don't. And you should know, that the ratio between those two is something like 1:1,000,000 So, for the most of the world, tech is essentially "magic" to them.