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Yes, yes they would. And they do. Regularly. When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or sim

Yes, yes they would. And they do. Regularly. When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year. Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched. Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers. And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.

eitland 5y ago
You basically typed out what I feel. Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name: "subscription fatigue" I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around. I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee. So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it. Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld. Edit: > Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem. But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.

eitland 5y ago

You basically typed out what I feel. Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name: "subscription fatigue" I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around. I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee. So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it. Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld. Edit: > Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem. But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.