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And that’s the sort of thing I’d expect from a programmer! The operational complexity of anything operating at scale extends far beyond the immediate cost. For

And that’s the sort of thing I’d expect from a programmer! The operational complexity of anything operating at scale extends far beyond the immediate cost. For example, play your scenario out: they give you a raise, you start managing something, and then you decide to leave? Then what? Or, you turn out to be incompetent and make a mistake that takes 24 hours to fix: that’s thousands of people unable to work! That’s going to cost the business a lot more than 80k. Ownership is a burden, ownership at scale is a nightmare. Paying a third-party to own something for you is fantastic value in the default case, until you have a strong business case for taking on that ownership burden. “One of our nerds says he’ll own it for 50% of the cost” is a terrible option, it’s nightmare waiting to happen. If I had 10k people, and I could pay $50k to offload ownership of some critical infrastructure to a third party, I wouldn’t even blink. That’s great value.

rglullis 4y ago
> sort of thing I’d expect from a programmer! Well, this is still called Hacker News. Am I in the wrong place? Anyway... you've created many strawmen here, where should I start? > you decide to leave? Then what? My "hiring" for it would imply defining a proper budget for it and a set of conditions negotiated a priori. It's not really "I will just do the job myself", I'm talking about "ok, you are willing to pay $80k/month to have this solved. Here are the 5 other different plans and solutions that we can implement and that will cost less than that, which one gets the go-ahead from upper management?" > make a mistake that takes 24 hours to fix: that’s thousands of people unable to work It's still coming out ahead of Github that took 11 days to solve? Also, what is that joke about HackerNews overloading with traffic whenever there is a github outage? Or that one of how half of the internet GDP being tied to AWS? Seriously though, the answer would be "you don't migrate everyone at once". You'd start with these migrations on a project-by-project basis, starting with the less critical projects on the new system and slowly weaning off on your dependency of the big vendor. Bonus: by migrating your systems you will have some kind of redundancy. If GH goes down, the teams could use the opportunity to move to the new system. It it works, the teams gain confidence and can accelerate the migration. It it doesn't, it becomes an opportunity to learn something out of a sunk cost. > If I had 10k people, and I could pay $50k to offload ownership of some critical infrastructure to a third party Paying $50k is not giving you any guarantee that your business is robust. You are just paying for CYA.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  it was tongue in cheek because you insulted the bean counters :) There’s not much more I can say because you’ve just outlined an operationally expensive strategy without appreciating the costs. I recommend spending some time in a big organisation, it’s hard to appreciate the enormity of the challenge in orchestrating people until you’ve witnessed it first hand. Amazon, for example, has thousands of employees dedicated just to running systems to support the other employees! And that’s out of necessity, because third-parties cannot meet their needs — if a third-party could, Amazon would absolutely use them in a heartbeat (as they do already in many cases). After my time at Amazon, I gleefully pay for 1Password for my org because the thought of what you outlined, in a growing org, would keep me up at night.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > I recommend spending some time in a big organisation My very first comment started with "I'm really not cut out to work for a big company". I am well aware that I do not want to do this. > After my time at Amazon, I gleefully pay for 1Password But that's exactly the type of cultural issue that I am talking about. So many people going to work at FAANGs and when they leave they think that mentality should be applied everywhere. The first issue in this thinking is straightforward: I know that in your mind your company is the greatest thing in the world, but it is not Amazon. YAGNI applies beyond software development. The second problem: FAANGs can operate like this because they are making so much money per employee that it simply does not matter to them. But this mentality when applied to a smaller company, can be the difference between 6 months or 2 years of runway. And every time that a company outsources this is a missed opportunity to learn how to do it more effectively. Instead of thinking "this would keep me up at night", I'd rather think "we are doing it the hard way, but that makes us more resilient and increases our chance of survival".
    - phphphphp 4y ago
      At $15k/month per employee on salary alone, 1Password costs <0.1%. I’d argue the complete opposite of your conclusion: the smaller you are, the more important it is to focus exclusively on the things that move the needle. Reducing my employee cost by 0.1% does not move the needle. If I spend my time debating the merits of self hosting a password manager, I’m not spending my time growing my business. The reason businesses like Amazon can be successful is because they focus on what matters, and that’s what startups need to embrace too.

rglullis 4y ago

> sort of thing I’d expect from a programmer! Well, this is still called Hacker News. Am I in the wrong place? Anyway... you've created many strawmen here, where should I start? > you decide to leave? Then what? My "hiring" for it would imply defining a proper budget for it and a set of conditions negotiated a priori. It's not really "I will just do the job myself", I'm talking about "ok, you are willing to pay $80k/month to have this solved. Here are the 5 other different plans and solutions that we can implement and that will cost less than that, which one gets the go-ahead from upper management?" > make a mistake that takes 24 hours to fix: that’s thousands of people unable to work It's still coming out ahead of Github that took 11 days to solve? Also, what is that joke about HackerNews overloading with traffic whenever there is a github outage? Or that one of how half of the internet GDP being tied to AWS? Seriously though, the answer would be "you don't migrate everyone at once". You'd start with these migrations on a project-by-project basis, starting with the less critical projects on the new system and slowly weaning off on your dependency of the big vendor. Bonus: by migrating your systems you will have some kind of redundancy. If GH goes down, the teams could use the opportunity to move to the new system. It it works, the teams gain confidence and can accelerate the migration. It it doesn't, it becomes an opportunity to learn something out of a sunk cost. > If I had 10k people, and I could pay $50k to offload ownership of some critical infrastructure to a third party Paying $50k is not giving you any guarantee that your business is robust. You are just paying for CYA.

phphphphp 4y ago
it was tongue in cheek because you insulted the bean counters :) There’s not much more I can say because you’ve just outlined an operationally expensive strategy without appreciating the costs. I recommend spending some time in a big organisation, it’s hard to appreciate the enormity of the challenge in orchestrating people until you’ve witnessed it first hand. Amazon, for example, has thousands of employees dedicated just to running systems to support the other employees! And that’s out of necessity, because third-parties cannot meet their needs — if a third-party could, Amazon would absolutely use them in a heartbeat (as they do already in many cases). After my time at Amazon, I gleefully pay for 1Password for my org because the thought of what you outlined, in a growing org, would keep me up at night.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > I recommend spending some time in a big organisation My very first comment started with "I'm really not cut out to work for a big company". I am well aware that I do not want to do this. > After my time at Amazon, I gleefully pay for 1Password But that's exactly the type of cultural issue that I am talking about. So many people going to work at FAANGs and when they leave they think that mentality should be applied everywhere. The first issue in this thinking is straightforward: I know that in your mind your company is the greatest thing in the world, but it is not Amazon. YAGNI applies beyond software development. The second problem: FAANGs can operate like this because they are making so much money per employee that it simply does not matter to them. But this mentality when applied to a smaller company, can be the difference between 6 months or 2 years of runway. And every time that a company outsources this is a missed opportunity to learn how to do it more effectively. Instead of thinking "this would keep me up at night", I'd rather think "we are doing it the hard way, but that makes us more resilient and increases our chance of survival".
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    At $15k/month per employee on salary alone, 1Password costs <0.1%. I’d argue the complete opposite of your conclusion: the smaller you are, the more important it is to focus exclusively on the things that move the needle. Reducing my employee cost by 0.1% does not move the needle. If I spend my time debating the merits of self hosting a password manager, I’m not spending my time growing my business. The reason businesses like Amazon can be successful is because they focus on what matters, and that’s what startups need to embrace too.