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Seems like a fairly concise list of Saas tools for a company of around 1,000 employees. If you've ever worked for a company 10-100X that size, you'll find this

Seems like a fairly concise list of Saas tools for a company of around 1,000 employees. If you've ever worked for a company 10-100X that size, you'll find this list quite small. To be honest, I clicked on the comments of this post to check my thesis that HN users would be astonished and was immediately validated. It's always amusing to me how people who only work in one area of the company (ie. engineers, designers, sales, etc.) think they are the only ones doing "real" work. Everybody else is doing bullshit and wasting money. Without fail, every single time, if you give rank-and-file the opportunity to express this, they will. Very few people in larger companies understand how the sausage is actually made, how leads are generated for the sausages, how sausage deals are closed, and how the sausage customers are nurtured for continued sausage business.

beh9540 6y ago
I'm fairly astonished how few duplicate applications are here. I work for a company the same size, and we have many more applications than this, with lots of overlapping and competing products. Kudos to management at Github.
- jdxcode 6y ago
  GitLab?
jrott 6y ago
Working at a fortune 500 company it feels like the tools that we have for planning alone is almost as long as that list. I'm exaggerating some but this is totally a small list compared to what it could be. The amount of SAAS tools that you want seems to scale pretty linearly with organizational complexity.
wsinks 6y ago
I just moved closer to the business operations side of a 2000 person business that's owned by a 10x the size business. Your comment has been my learning in the last six months. Holy mother of god there's so many things that keep the company running.
cosmie 6y ago
> It's always amusing to me how people who only work in one area of the company (ie. engineers, designers, sales, etc.) think they are the only ones doing "real" work. Everybody else is doing bullshit and wasting money. Without fail, every single time, if you give rank-and-file the opportunity to express this, they will. Same here. I've spent my career hopping between functionally different areas - supply chain, IT, business operations, marketing, BI/Analytics, and a few hybrid/in-between roles. As you said, every single time, each group tends to trivialize the contributions and efforts of the others. They also tend to have very little awareness of their own unique privileges. When I'm on a business team, even if I'm doing technical work it takes an absurd amount of effort and approvals to even get local admin access to my computer, whereas when I'm on a technical team it gets rubber stamped and is usually part of the onboarding process. Same with infrastructure - if I need to set up a recurring process/script, it's pretty trivial finding/accessing infrastructure somewhere that I can plop that onto when I'm on a technical team. But god forbid I have the same need while working on a business team - you have to move mountains and requisitions to be able to accomplish the same thing. There are privileges in the other direction, too. In particular, sales/marketing/account people expense an absurd amount of stuff in the daily happenings of their job, and can choose to do so with little fanfare. Whereas on the IT side, it can be near impossible to spend $10/month on something if there isn't a clear business unit to charge it back to and wasn't in the annual IT budget. At the end of the day, every group tends to have different internal skillsets and organizational capabilities and restrictions. And all are working just as hard as the other to keep the sausage flowing, within the capacity of their abilities and role. The number of posts and comments on HN about devs struggling with marketing/selling their single person SaaS should be an indicator that you shouldn't trivialize any group's contributions before taking the time to fully understand them.
- htrp 6y ago
  Just sounds like people have't been able to walk a mile in anyone's shoes
  - cosmie 6y ago
    Pretty much. What's curious is just how universally true it tends to be, though. A personal hunch of mine is that it's also one of the implicit strengths of technical people starting companies. Software engineering teaches you to develop mental frameworks around systems and integrations and abstractions. And once someone with that experience walks a mile on the business side of the house, they're able to develop organizational structures that maximizes the organizational effectiveness as a whole rather than the local maximums within each group that are traditionally found. Although that's not always what happens, it's an outcome that's unique to such circumstances.
lavezzi 6y ago
Very, very familiar to the Tech Stack at our SaaS company with a similar amount of employees. They are also using our products too. :)
threeqhan 6y ago
What about those of us that think our own work is mostly bullshit
- jessaustin 6y ago
  https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

beh9540 6y ago

I'm fairly astonished how few duplicate applications are here. I work for a company the same size, and we have many more applications than this, with lots of overlapping and competing products. Kudos to management at Github.

jdxcode 6y ago
GitLab?

jrott 6y ago

Working at a fortune 500 company it feels like the tools that we have for planning alone is almost as long as that list. I'm exaggerating some but this is totally a small list compared to what it could be. The amount of SAAS tools that you want seems to scale pretty linearly with organizational complexity.

wsinks 6y ago

I just moved closer to the business operations side of a 2000 person business that's owned by a 10x the size business. Your comment has been my learning in the last six months. Holy mother of god there's so many things that keep the company running.

cosmie 6y ago

> It's always amusing to me how people who only work in one area of the company (ie. engineers, designers, sales, etc.) think they are the only ones doing "real" work. Everybody else is doing bullshit and wasting money. Without fail, every single time, if you give rank-and-file the opportunity to express this, they will. Same here. I've spent my career hopping between functionally different areas - supply chain, IT, business operations, marketing, BI/Analytics, and a few hybrid/in-between roles. As you said, every single time, each group tends to trivialize the contributions and efforts of the others. They also tend to have very little awareness of their own unique privileges. When I'm on a business team, even if I'm doing technical work it takes an absurd amount of effort and approvals to even get local admin access to my computer, whereas when I'm on a technical team it gets rubber stamped and is usually part of the onboarding process. Same with infrastructure - if I need to set up a recurring process/script, it's pretty trivial finding/accessing infrastructure somewhere that I can plop that onto when I'm on a technical team. But god forbid I have the same need while working on a business team - you have to move mountains and requisitions to be able to accomplish the same thing. There are privileges in the other direction, too. In particular, sales/marketing/account people expense an absurd amount of stuff in the daily happenings of their job, and can choose to do so with little fanfare. Whereas on the IT side, it can be near impossible to spend $10/month on something if there isn't a clear business unit to charge it back to and wasn't in the annual IT budget. At the end of the day, every group tends to have different internal skillsets and organizational capabilities and restrictions. And all are working just as hard as the other to keep the sausage flowing, within the capacity of their abilities and role. The number of posts and comments on HN about devs struggling with marketing/selling their single person SaaS should be an indicator that you shouldn't trivialize any group's contributions before taking the time to fully understand them.

htrp 6y ago
Just sounds like people have't been able to walk a mile in anyone's shoes
- cosmie 6y ago
  Pretty much. What's curious is just how universally true it tends to be, though. A personal hunch of mine is that it's also one of the implicit strengths of technical people starting companies. Software engineering teaches you to develop mental frameworks around systems and integrations and abstractions. And once someone with that experience walks a mile on the business side of the house, they're able to develop organizational structures that maximizes the organizational effectiveness as a whole rather than the local maximums within each group that are traditionally found. Although that's not always what happens, it's an outcome that's unique to such circumstances.

lavezzi 6y ago

Very, very familiar to the Tech Stack at our SaaS company with a similar amount of employees. They are also using our products too. :)

threeqhan 6y ago

What about those of us that think our own work is mostly bullshit

jessaustin 6y ago
https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/