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So many tools. What really frustrates me about stuff like this, every new employee brings in their own biases and tools they prefer to work with, then there's a

by asim 4y ago

So many tools. What really frustrates me about stuff like this, every new employee brings in their own biases and tools they prefer to work with, then there's a battle over working with an existing process or replacing it for the new shiny thing which isn't really that much better. The majority of time you just spend learning these new tools only to then be replaced by something else. What's worse, every tool is some additional per head user cost. Personally I get the feeling like a bundled GSuite plus some chat and Jira workflow does the job but maybe I'm just old school.

boredemployee 4y ago
I agree. I'm not sure how the other fields are, but in the data universe things are going nuts. Too many new tools, algorithms, frameworks, dataviz apps, its crazy. Most of the time, we spent 2-5 days to properly learn some new tool for 1 job and then never look at it again. That's frustrating.
Octabrain 4y ago
Well, the same case exists the other way around: Companies using stuff that in theory just """works"""™ that is painful and clearly not the best choice but still using it for lack of knowledge, corporate folklore, someone with ego and power decided it or any combination of the previous.
lbriner 4y ago
Yeah. The one that always gets me is the arguments about task tools Trello vs Jira vs Azure Devops etc. They pretty much all do the same thing but there will always be someone who picks one specific feature of one specific tools like its the deal-winner even though they could easily live without it. As for marketing tools, don't get me started, a lot of them I find morally unpleasant (well, the ones that provide leads for a fee, which are mostly obtained indirectly without consent or knowledge) I think lots of people think that if there is a tool, they must use it instead of Excel/OpenOffice whatever at $30/person/month just because it is a bit nicer.
ksec 4y ago
>So many tools. Which is why, despite HN / Social Media or literally everyone working in Tech thinks we need decentralise or more tools for each function. What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. > but maybe I'm just old school. The whole tech industry is hype driven and worst than fast fashion.
- ehnto 4y ago
  For what should be a reasonably mature industry, we sure do fuss a lot about how to do things we should probably have solutions for. I spend a decent amount of time split between different projects, old and new, and there is something very nice about a well-appointed mature framework that you don't get from cutting-edge bare-bones approaches.
- mellavora 4y ago
  > What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. So, Microsoft Office?
- asim 4y ago
  > What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. I agree. I think a lot of this should just be done by one tool. Unfortunately the incumbents like Google and Microsoft are doing a poor job beyond the initial software they built e.g Google Cloud Dashboard takes 5 seconds between page loads, this is horrendous. To be honest I think if you scrapped a lot of the UI functionality and made it CLI based it would work far better. If all SaaS tools were reimagined as a singular CLI tool, maybe even in a UI, it would be better than what we have.
ehnto 4y ago
Each tool likely contains a little bit of business logic and domain knowledge too, so you end up spreading your company's procedures and business rules throughout all these little SaaS products. On one hand you have savvy non-technical people running entire businesses from a complex spreadsheet, and I think the SaaS Rube Goldberg is what you have in the other hand.
orangepurple 4y ago
If you were old school you wouldn't recommend Jira but self hosted Redmine
- kirbez 4y ago
  [dead]
remus 4y ago
In the context of it being a 20 person company I don't think what they've listed is excessive. Each person is likely going to be using a subset of those tools in their day to day work. Just spit balling, but say they had 2 designers who spent most of their day in Excalidraw/Figma/Retool. For them that's a great investment as it makes their lives way easier. Same deal with developers and github/sourcegraph/... and marketing with intercom/mailchimp/... No doubt they could consolidate some things and just completely do without others, but overall it doesn't seem that crazy.
ericmcer 4y ago
The question is if that is better or worse than in house tools? If a company uses some analytics tool (knowledge that might be reusable at other jobs) it seems better to pick that up than to learn an in house one (knowledge which will definitely not be reusable).

by asim 4y ago

boredemployee 4y ago

I agree. I'm not sure how the other fields are, but in the data universe things are going nuts. Too many new tools, algorithms, frameworks, dataviz apps, its crazy. Most of the time, we spent 2-5 days to properly learn some new tool for 1 job and then never look at it again. That's frustrating.

Octabrain 4y ago

Well, the same case exists the other way around: Companies using stuff that in theory just """works"""™ that is painful and clearly not the best choice but still using it for lack of knowledge, corporate folklore, someone with ego and power decided it or any combination of the previous.

lbriner 4y ago

Yeah. The one that always gets me is the arguments about task tools Trello vs Jira vs Azure Devops etc. They pretty much all do the same thing but there will always be someone who picks one specific feature of one specific tools like its the deal-winner even though they could easily live without it. As for marketing tools, don't get me started, a lot of them I find morally unpleasant (well, the ones that provide leads for a fee, which are mostly obtained indirectly without consent or knowledge) I think lots of people think that if there is a tool, they must use it instead of Excel/OpenOffice whatever at $30/person/month just because it is a bit nicer.

ksec 4y ago

>So many tools. Which is why, despite HN / Social Media or literally everyone working in Tech thinks we need decentralise or more tools for each function. What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. > but maybe I'm just old school. The whole tech industry is hype driven and worst than fast fashion.

ehnto 4y ago
For what should be a reasonably mature industry, we sure do fuss a lot about how to do things we should probably have solutions for. I spend a decent amount of time split between different projects, old and new, and there is something very nice about a well-appointed mature framework that you don't get from cutting-edge bare-bones approaches.
mellavora 4y ago
> What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. So, Microsoft Office?
asim 4y ago
> What I actually want is a well designed and integrated solution for 80 to 90% of these functions. I agree. I think a lot of this should just be done by one tool. Unfortunately the incumbents like Google and Microsoft are doing a poor job beyond the initial software they built e.g Google Cloud Dashboard takes 5 seconds between page loads, this is horrendous. To be honest I think if you scrapped a lot of the UI functionality and made it CLI based it would work far better. If all SaaS tools were reimagined as a singular CLI tool, maybe even in a UI, it would be better than what we have.

ehnto 4y ago

Each tool likely contains a little bit of business logic and domain knowledge too, so you end up spreading your company's procedures and business rules throughout all these little SaaS products. On one hand you have savvy non-technical people running entire businesses from a complex spreadsheet, and I think the SaaS Rube Goldberg is what you have in the other hand.

orangepurple 4y ago

If you were old school you wouldn't recommend Jira but self hosted Redmine

kirbez 4y ago
[dead]

remus 4y ago

In the context of it being a 20 person company I don't think what they've listed is excessive. Each person is likely going to be using a subset of those tools in their day to day work. Just spit balling, but say they had 2 designers who spent most of their day in Excalidraw/Figma/Retool. For them that's a great investment as it makes their lives way easier. Same deal with developers and github/sourcegraph/... and marketing with intercom/mailchimp/... No doubt they could consolidate some things and just completely do without others, but overall it doesn't seem that crazy.

ericmcer 4y ago

The question is if that is better or worse than in house tools? If a company uses some analytics tool (knowledge that might be reusable at other jobs) it seems better to pick that up than to learn an in house one (knowledge which will definitely not be reusable).