5 ms·

I like the idea, but a lot of other factors are missing from the analysis. 1. I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I es

I like the idea, but a lot of other factors are missing from the analysis. 1. I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time? 2. Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? 3. How much does this increase or decrease my personal time required as supervisor? 4. From a financial point of view, I’m still paying the employee and the service, so either I need enough services and time savings that I can eliminate a job, or the service has to have positive ROI of its own. And probably many more. I often receive proposals of this type, that I could be “saving” so much by buying something. The money goes out up front, the savings are supposed to trickle back in these hard to quantify and use ways.

dijit 6y ago
> I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time? Sure you have, albeit by another name likely. GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week. I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate. Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service. But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth investing in a service vs hiring someone dedicated and running something yourself. > Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? There’s two points to this argument; 1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me? 2) if I’m an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have to be in the office 9hrs per day. The first argument is at odds with the notion that most knowledge worker jobs tend to only be around 40% productive.[0] There’s no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the reasons that percentage is so low, though, is friction. Friction can take many forms such as a bureaucratic process for approvals to change things- all the way to “needing to talk to that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an outage”. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions and there is evidence to suggest that removing these frictions increases productivity, not lessens it. (To a value of 80% which represents a significant increase). (I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is from a phone) Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you’re in the office you must be busy- there’s no value to you the employee of the company gets more efficient! Except obviously that’s not true in a more macro sense; I wouldn’t argue that. I would instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with doing actual work and not busywork will make people more engaged and not less. You wouldn’t feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble your chair each time you wanted to sit in it, it would be tedious and not challenging and certainly cause you to mentally check out. [0]: https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend-their-time/ https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend...
- wil421 6y ago
  How does Github save time over the predecessors like self hosted a Git or SVN repository?
  - deviantfero 6y ago
    Pull request management, code reviews, CI flows, github actions, github does have many features that other git clients don't, certainly not a self hosted git or SVN repositories, and those features save a lot of time just in the ease of initial setup.
  - jeremymcanally 6y ago
    Permissions. I specifically remember talking to Tom and Chris about how that was really the main point of rage that spawned the idea of GitHub (and its original slogan “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass”).
    - ori_b 6y ago
      Did you spend 5 hours per week per employee managing permissions in git?
      - cmbell715 6y ago
        Maybe not managing permissions directly. But I could easily see a number like that, or higher, being plausible if you consider clean up from junior devs accidentally pushing to development/main branches thinking they were on their feature branch. Which is an issue directly solved by permissions.
      - jeremymcanally 6y ago
        Setting up and managing keys, spinning up new repos, etc. would suck up an inordinate amount of time. This was especially true when I worked at consultancies. Blocking developer work with “Sorry gotta wait on Todd to add you to the server and set you up on Git,” when Todd would avoid it like the plague because it sucked would lose a lot of time. If you averaged the time out, it may not have hit the five hour per week mark, but it combined with other time savers (linking Git directly with the issue tracker for example instead of having to figure out how to cross reference them) easily did/does.
groby_b 6y ago
> Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? Take a management class or three, it'll save you a lot of money. Seriously. If that needs to figure into the evaluation of the service, something is deeply broken in the culture of your company. Not because employees goof off - it happens, and only some amount of that is under your control. But because you assume that given any chance, people would goof off more. That's far from normal. It usually happens if employees feel mistreated, or if they're not given a fair share of the value they create. Possibly if they're already halfway to leaving.
- projektfu 6y ago
  You’re adding value judgements into it that are not there. A person can be working, accomplishing the same amount, and take 35 or 40 hours to do the task, without goofing off.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    They can also go home. They can tackle other work. The fact that they don't is a reflection of the work culture. You're right, I judge that.
moonsu 6y ago
> 4. From a financial point of view, I’m still paying the employee and the service, so either I need enough services and time savings that I can eliminate a job, or the service has to have positive ROI of its own. More likely, there's other work that the employee could be doing that will help your company grow

dijit 6y ago

> I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time? Sure you have, albeit by another name likely. GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week. I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate. Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service. But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth investing in a service vs hiring someone dedicated and running something yourself. > Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? There’s two points to this argument; 1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me? 2) if I’m an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have to be in the office 9hrs per day. The first argument is at odds with the notion that most knowledge worker jobs tend to only be around 40% productive.[0] There’s no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the reasons that percentage is so low, though, is friction. Friction can take many forms such as a bureaucratic process for approvals to change things- all the way to “needing to talk to that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an outage”. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions and there is evidence to suggest that removing these frictions increases productivity, not lessens it. (To a value of 80% which represents a significant increase). (I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is from a phone) Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you’re in the office you must be busy- there’s no value to you the employee of the company gets more efficient! Except obviously that’s not true in a more macro sense; I wouldn’t argue that. I would instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with doing actual work and not busywork will make people more engaged and not less. You wouldn’t feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble your chair each time you wanted to sit in it, it would be tedious and not challenging and certainly cause you to mentally check out. [0]: https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend-their-time/ https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend...

wil421 6y ago
How does Github save time over the predecessors like self hosted a Git or SVN repository?
- deviantfero 6y ago
  Pull request management, code reviews, CI flows, github actions, github does have many features that other git clients don't, certainly not a self hosted git or SVN repositories, and those features save a lot of time just in the ease of initial setup.
- jeremymcanally 6y ago
  Permissions. I specifically remember talking to Tom and Chris about how that was really the main point of rage that spawned the idea of GitHub (and its original slogan “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass”).
  - ori_b 6y ago
    Did you spend 5 hours per week per employee managing permissions in git?
    - cmbell715 6y ago
      Maybe not managing permissions directly. But I could easily see a number like that, or higher, being plausible if you consider clean up from junior devs accidentally pushing to development/main branches thinking they were on their feature branch. Which is an issue directly solved by permissions.
    - jeremymcanally 6y ago
      Setting up and managing keys, spinning up new repos, etc. would suck up an inordinate amount of time. This was especially true when I worked at consultancies. Blocking developer work with “Sorry gotta wait on Todd to add you to the server and set you up on Git,” when Todd would avoid it like the plague because it sucked would lose a lot of time. If you averaged the time out, it may not have hit the five hour per week mark, but it combined with other time savers (linking Git directly with the issue tracker for example instead of having to figure out how to cross reference them) easily did/does.

groby_b 6y ago

> Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage? Take a management class or three, it'll save you a lot of money. Seriously. If that needs to figure into the evaluation of the service, something is deeply broken in the culture of your company. Not because employees goof off - it happens, and only some amount of that is under your control. But because you assume that given any chance, people would goof off more. That's far from normal. It usually happens if employees feel mistreated, or if they're not given a fair share of the value they create. Possibly if they're already halfway to leaving.

projektfu 6y ago
You’re adding value judgements into it that are not there. A person can be working, accomplishing the same amount, and take 35 or 40 hours to do the task, without goofing off.
- groby_b 6y ago
  They can also go home. They can tackle other work. The fact that they don't is a reflection of the work culture. You're right, I judge that.

moonsu 6y ago

> 4. From a financial point of view, I’m still paying the employee and the service, so either I need enough services and time savings that I can eliminate a job, or the service has to have positive ROI of its own. More likely, there's other work that the employee could be doing that will help your company grow