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>That was ~$4000 and the decision whether to build our own data annotation system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of business documentation, RFCs, a

>That was ~$4000 and the decision whether to build our own data annotation system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of business documentation, RFCs, approvals, NDA processes, etc. It was deeply non-trivial to procure that, and building our own was a very serious option we pursued with tech specs and prototypes and everything. The fact that you went through all of that for a 4k line item means there's something wrong at your end. You would have burned through multiples of that putting together a prototype, only to them spend lots of hours on the procurement process for my team would have just put on a credit card (exaggerating but only somewhat). Sounds like you are not really accounting for the opportunity cost of your peoples time.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
> You would have burned through multiples of that putting together a prototype No, we had the prototype we needed for making the decision with 1 team member working on it part-time for 4 weeks. Your economics are way off. The cost of the prototype pales in comparison to risks around vendor lock-in, security issues, license growth, etc. The legal team vetting the contract and NDAs is the real expense - and well worth it to be quite careful about vendor software. The cheap quick prototype helped us realize the longterm cost of maintaining that tool was too large, and the upfront procurement costs were worth it. In a “move fast and break things” shitshow where you just instantly buy the vendor software, the risk of getting burned on a bad / unsafe contract is huge, and you end up playing hot potato with the 3 licenses you bought because you didn’t appropriately plan for license growth, dealing with data breaches, etc. I think you’re naively reacting to the perception of a bureaucracy unable to do anything, but it’s totally not. This type of vetting is very cost effective. It’s also why nobody is just quickly dropping $25k on consulting from freelancers.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

> You would have burned through multiples of that putting together a prototype No, we had the prototype we needed for making the decision with 1 team member working on it part-time for 4 weeks. Your economics are way off. The cost of the prototype pales in comparison to risks around vendor lock-in, security issues, license growth, etc. The legal team vetting the contract and NDAs is the real expense - and well worth it to be quite careful about vendor software. The cheap quick prototype helped us realize the longterm cost of maintaining that tool was too large, and the upfront procurement costs were worth it. In a “move fast and break things” shitshow where you just instantly buy the vendor software, the risk of getting burned on a bad / unsafe contract is huge, and you end up playing hot potato with the 3 licenses you bought because you didn’t appropriately plan for license growth, dealing with data breaches, etc. I think you’re naively reacting to the perception of a bureaucracy unable to do anything, but it’s totally not. This type of vetting is very cost effective. It’s also why nobody is just quickly dropping $25k on consulting from freelancers.