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> The Bottom Line > It’s cheaper—and less frustrating for your developers—to pay more for better hardware to keep your team on track. I agree with this point,
by yosito 4y ago
> The Bottom Line
> It’s cheaper—and less frustrating for your developers—to pay more for better hardware to keep your team on track.
I agree with this point, 100%. And not just in the context of build hardware. It's often cheaper to pay for specialized services rather than paying in-house developers to do those things. I've lost count of the number of times in my career that I've spent days of effort (at $200/hr) so that the company I was working for could avoid paying for some $15/mo SaaS.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- emerongi 4y agoPremature optimization is the root of all evil. It's almost always better to start by using a specialized service, even if it's overpriced. Later on you can evaluate much more adequately if you'd save money/time by building your own.
- gpderetta 4y agoPremature "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is the root of all evil. Recurse as needed.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoI'm experiencing the contrary, my company paying over a 100K a year for a managed service I could deploy and maintain single handed and it would still require less than 5% of my time. But you know, when you're scared of the unknown unknowns, the risk, managed services are attractive.
- ilyt 4y agoIf we started from scratch, all the automation we have would take months to build so cloud might be cost effective for first few years. But with automation already in place cost to both maintain that and that once-a-month visit to replace a hard disk in datacenter, or once-a year half-day to install few servers is far cheaper than anything cloud, especially if you need bandwidth
- jameshart 4y agoThe cost to a business of lost developer productivity is not the salary cost of the developer doing non dev work. It is the lost productivity of the developer not making the things you’re paying them for. The reason the business is willing to spend $x a year on the developer is because the developer produces >$x a year of value, in the form of revenue generating software. If you divert 5% of your time into doing something else, you are taking money the business wanted to invest into capital (new software features) and spending it on… something else. Lunch orders or whatever. Not making capital, anyhow.
- kqr 4y agoHuh. I find myself partly disagreeing with this but I cannot for the life of me articulate why. Upvoted in the hope that a discussion is sparked...
- TYMorningCoffee 4y agoThere also qualitative benefits like the knowledge the developer and the company gains. Also, the developer might enjoy the change of scenery.
- plonk 4y agoFor us the work was mostly in adapting the old codebase to CI/CD and writing/debugging the workflows. There’s almost no additional cost to running self-hosted runners, in fact we wouldn’t be using GitHub at all if they didn’t offer a local runner.
- albrewer 4y agoMy entire role at my current company could be better served by spending $60k on software licenses a year, but they choose to pay triple that for me to create a shittier version of it. I'm not complaining, really, because it's been an enormous amount of fun and I've been able to solve a ton of interesting problems, but from a business perspective it makes absolutely no sense.