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This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on eng

This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget. The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.

sokoloff 5y ago
A lot of the driver here is not in the moment short-sightedness, but rather a byproduct of the procurement or other finance processes (ironically often instituted with intent to prevent waste and fraud or make the company more efficient). It’s not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc. If you’re selling to an enterprise, don’t charge just above whatever the “employees can put it on their card without approval”. If you’re going to exceed that, you might as well exceed it by a lot. (If you’re going to make every developer file an expense report every month, I can readily prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than filing an expense report… If I automate that for a lot of my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor folk hero.) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
- zapita 5y ago
  A lot of those enterprises already have Docker on the vendor list though, because of Docker Hub.
  - jen20 5y ago
    I suspect that most people running at the kind of scale where purchasing is hugely problematic are also running Artifactory or similar, not using Docker Hub.
treeman79 5y ago
I’ve seen companies burn half a million in developer time to save 10k or less several times. Oh some JavaScript graphing library is expensive. Let’s roll our own! Heroku meets our needs 100% let’s spend millions to switch to K8 and have a much worse experience.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  The 4 hours I spent learning the basics of d3 and then couple hours a night for a few weeks working through examples (of others and of my own design) really gave me a powerful new tool for charting applications. Rolling your own is difficult to justify, but "learn and use d3 (BSD licensed)" seems an entirely reasonable alternative to a high-priced commercial offering.
  - grp000 5y ago
    How much of that is developers doing it because they want to make something new?
alkonaut 5y ago
If someone suggests a tool that costs $1k/yr over a free tool that costs $5k/year in extra work, I’m going to die on the free tool hill. Because the $1k/yr tool will disappear when the company goes defunct, or it won’t interoperate with something else and there is no way of fixing it. Or it can’t migrate to the next tool. Or we need to upgrade to an enterprise license because we become 21 developers instead of 20. Or they just bump the cost to $20k for whatever reason. Or the tool won’t work on CI servers because it only works after entering a key in an attended install (yes this is still a thing). Free tools have a predictable and stable cost. I have probably been burned more times from free tools over the years, but the scars aren’t as deep. It’s just a shrug and hoping the other project works when the first doesn’t.
- Closi 5y ago
  > Free tools have a predictable and stable cost. Unless they suddenly turn from free into a $21/month per person fee.
  - 10000truths 5y ago
    I think he means free as in open source, rather than free as in freeware. In which the worst case scenario is that you are stuck with the last open-source version, but at least you retain full control over your fork of the code and can add features and bug fixes as you see fit.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      Indeed. Proprietary/Closed-source but costing $0 is the worst of both worlds.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Then I'll find the fork and use that. We have already done that a few times. There is a reason we audit all the licenses of open source software we have.
Johnny555 5y ago
A big advantage of using free open source software is that the licensing prices will never increase because the company needs a new revenue stream to support its business model. Docker Desktop was free, now it's $21/month, what will it cost next year when Docker needs more money?
- rchaud 5y ago
  Licensing prices might not increase, but paid technical support costs could theoretically be unlimited. Especially if you're at the mercy of an open-source software that isn't well-maintained.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That depends on how many frogs contentedly stay in the pot.
version_five 5y ago
Exactly. I've never understood why capital or cash expense costs are valued so much differently than salary costs. I've had jobs (like any manager) where I have complete leeway on how I "spend" millions of dollars of people's time, but had to to through all kinds of approval to spend even the smallest amount of money.
- JanisL 5y ago
  A lot of it is path dependency whereby various practices turn into processes, regulations and laws. On top of this narratives form that guide peoples thinking as to what the right financial decisions are, then people can start to believe these narratives over time without questioning them. Eventually companies can create certain processes or habits on the basis that those narratives need to be true: https://www.epsilontheory.com/what-do-we-need-to-be-true/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/what-do-we-need-to-be-true/
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  graft is a serious issue with purchase orders, its much less of an issue with salaries.
- Macha 5y ago
  Another example is if I want a $100 keyboard I need ahead of time VP sign off for the non-standard expense, if I want $10000/mo extra in AWS services I need any other engineer to approve my change
- SmellTheGlove 5y ago
  There are a few reasons: - Reviewing purchases should put some reasonable controls around how much software you can accumulate. Adding to the tech stack has maintenance costs, and you don't really want to do it without some sort of review. In this case, it's not the dollars as much as the fit. - With SaaS tools in particular, there are often privacy or security concerns. Those teams should review. Probably want legal's eyes on it to get the right terms in place as well. Again, less about the dollars here, and more about the agreement, risk, required disclosures (subprocessor, etc), and those kinds of factors. - On the spend itself, you'd be surprised how this adds up, especially if folks are signing multi-year deals and not bothering to negotiate licensing. Remember, if it's easy for you and me to buy, it's easy for everyone else to buy too, and it multiplies quickly. Now, on one-off hardware purchases and such, I agree it should be a lot easier. At least at the startup I work at, anything under $500 is just an expense report, so just make sure your manager is cool with it and go for it. But there are considerations here also around stuff coming in that IT or facilities then needs to support - obligating their time with your purchase is something you need to agree on or avoid. EDIT: Also as someone else pointed out, grift on purchase orders is easy without any oversight.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders. A lot of it is that opportunity cost really isn't the problem of many business units. I spent a week building a crappy version of codecov for our few repos. Dev won't get in trouble for that because opportunity cost isn't a thing for us as a cost centre.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Unless there is a security audit and the dev has to justify why non authorized software is on the company network.

sokoloff 5y ago

A lot of the driver here is not in the moment short-sightedness, but rather a byproduct of the procurement or other finance processes (ironically often instituted with intent to prevent waste and fraud or make the company more efficient). It’s not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc. If you’re selling to an enterprise, don’t charge just above whatever the “employees can put it on their card without approval”. If you’re going to exceed that, you might as well exceed it by a lot. (If you’re going to make every developer file an expense report every month, I can readily prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than filing an expense report… If I automate that for a lot of my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor folk hero.) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

zapita 5y ago
A lot of those enterprises already have Docker on the vendor list though, because of Docker Hub.
- jen20 5y ago
  I suspect that most people running at the kind of scale where purchasing is hugely problematic are also running Artifactory or similar, not using Docker Hub.

treeman79 5y ago

I’ve seen companies burn half a million in developer time to save 10k or less several times. Oh some JavaScript graphing library is expensive. Let’s roll our own! Heroku meets our needs 100% let’s spend millions to switch to K8 and have a much worse experience.

sokoloff 5y ago
The 4 hours I spent learning the basics of d3 and then couple hours a night for a few weeks working through examples (of others and of my own design) really gave me a powerful new tool for charting applications. Rolling your own is difficult to justify, but "learn and use d3 (BSD licensed)" seems an entirely reasonable alternative to a high-priced commercial offering.
- grp000 5y ago
  How much of that is developers doing it because they want to make something new?

alkonaut 5y ago

If someone suggests a tool that costs $1k/yr over a free tool that costs $5k/year in extra work, I’m going to die on the free tool hill. Because the $1k/yr tool will disappear when the company goes defunct, or it won’t interoperate with something else and there is no way of fixing it. Or it can’t migrate to the next tool. Or we need to upgrade to an enterprise license because we become 21 developers instead of 20. Or they just bump the cost to $20k for whatever reason. Or the tool won’t work on CI servers because it only works after entering a key in an attended install (yes this is still a thing). Free tools have a predictable and stable cost. I have probably been burned more times from free tools over the years, but the scars aren’t as deep. It’s just a shrug and hoping the other project works when the first doesn’t.

Closi 5y ago
> Free tools have a predictable and stable cost. Unless they suddenly turn from free into a $21/month per person fee.
- 10000truths 5y ago
  I think he means free as in open source, rather than free as in freeware. In which the worst case scenario is that you are stuck with the last open-source version, but at least you retain full control over your fork of the code and can add features and bug fixes as you see fit.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    Indeed. Proprietary/Closed-source but costing $0 is the worst of both worlds.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Then I'll find the fork and use that. We have already done that a few times. There is a reason we audit all the licenses of open source software we have.

Johnny555 5y ago

A big advantage of using free open source software is that the licensing prices will never increase because the company needs a new revenue stream to support its business model. Docker Desktop was free, now it's $21/month, what will it cost next year when Docker needs more money?

rchaud 5y ago
Licensing prices might not increase, but paid technical support costs could theoretically be unlimited. Especially if you're at the mercy of an open-source software that isn't well-maintained.
sokoloff 5y ago
That depends on how many frogs contentedly stay in the pot.

version_five 5y ago

Exactly. I've never understood why capital or cash expense costs are valued so much differently than salary costs. I've had jobs (like any manager) where I have complete leeway on how I "spend" millions of dollars of people's time, but had to to through all kinds of approval to spend even the smallest amount of money.

JanisL 5y ago
A lot of it is path dependency whereby various practices turn into processes, regulations and laws. On top of this narratives form that guide peoples thinking as to what the right financial decisions are, then people can start to believe these narratives over time without questioning them. Eventually companies can create certain processes or habits on the basis that those narratives need to be true: https://www.epsilontheory.com/what-do-we-need-to-be-true/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/what-do-we-need-to-be-true/
throwaway2048 5y ago
graft is a serious issue with purchase orders, its much less of an issue with salaries.
Macha 5y ago
Another example is if I want a $100 keyboard I need ahead of time VP sign off for the non-standard expense, if I want $10000/mo extra in AWS services I need any other engineer to approve my change
SmellTheGlove 5y ago
There are a few reasons: - Reviewing purchases should put some reasonable controls around how much software you can accumulate. Adding to the tech stack has maintenance costs, and you don't really want to do it without some sort of review. In this case, it's not the dollars as much as the fit. - With SaaS tools in particular, there are often privacy or security concerns. Those teams should review. Probably want legal's eyes on it to get the right terms in place as well. Again, less about the dollars here, and more about the agreement, risk, required disclosures (subprocessor, etc), and those kinds of factors. - On the spend itself, you'd be surprised how this adds up, especially if folks are signing multi-year deals and not bothering to negotiate licensing. Remember, if it's easy for you and me to buy, it's easy for everyone else to buy too, and it multiplies quickly. Now, on one-off hardware purchases and such, I agree it should be a lot easier. At least at the startup I work at, anything under $500 is just an expense report, so just make sure your manager is cool with it and go for it. But there are considerations here also around stuff coming in that IT or facilities then needs to support - obligating their time with your purchase is something you need to agree on or avoid. EDIT: Also as someone else pointed out, grift on purchase orders is easy without any oversight.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders. A lot of it is that opportunity cost really isn't the problem of many business units. I spent a week building a crappy version of codecov for our few repos. Dev won't get in trouble for that because opportunity cost isn't a thing for us as a cost centre.

pjmlp 5y ago
Unless there is a security audit and the dev has to justify why non authorized software is on the company network.