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What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense. Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the compan
by roughly 4y ago
What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense.
Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes, accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year.
Docker wants you to pay $10/mo to make your $20k/mo developer more effective, and companies in our industry would rather spend several months of developer time building an alternative that they'll have to support forever and teach every new individual coming into the company how to use.
For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time.
- twblalock 4y agoIf you do the same math for a company with thousands, or tens of thousands, of developers, the answer looks different. Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that is a lot less critical than the container runtime. The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher might might fully meet their needs. What should they do then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open source alternative that has feature parity?
- roughly 4y agoOk, I'll do the math: $250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3 developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's $62.5k/yr. That pushes our payoff time out to 2.5 years. Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer productivity of 1% (our solution has a bug that means things are slow for a day, developers can't google for easy answers, developers have to port things into our system) - that's a minute of extra work for every ~2hrs. That's 1000*250k*.01, or a net drain to the company of $2.5M/yr, which effectively pushes our payback time out to "never". Hell, we can even work the math the other way - for replacing Docker Desktop to be worthwhile, it's gotta cost less than $120/yr/developer. Developers cost $250k/yr, for call it 250 days of work per year, so $1000/day, or $125/hr, which means if the aggregate cost of our replacement to an individual user is even an hour per year, it wouldn't be worth doing for free. Add in the cost of actually having someone actually maintain our replacement product, and the math's even shittier.
- vasco 4y agoA big mistake with this math is that globally developers are not paid anywhere close to 250k/yr even fully loaded for the company. In my country in Europe it's closer to 60k/yr fully loaded. There is cheaper. Also most companies aren't gonna build something from scratch, they are going to use something else that is also available. That being said this type of exercise is good to show because many managers do not do it.
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- rpgmaker 4y agoMan they're really screwing developers over in Europe. That's what they earn in the third world.
- chillfox 4y agoOn the other hand they do get free health care, free uni (if in the right country), a social safety net that you can actually live decently on and other services.
- Karrot_Kream 4y agoYeah I know Indian devs getting paid that much.
- alanfranz 4y agoRemember that Europe is quite large and not homogeneous. For sure wages are lower and less different between blue collar and white collar jobs, which is both good and bad. We don’t know where the gp is posting from; btw in places like London or Berlin a dev can make 2x that figure.
- ofrzeta 4y agoGetting 60k here also means the employer pays half of health insurance and half of the unemployment insurance.
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- paxys 4y agoMore users = greater need for dedicated support. A company that has tens of thousands of developers will need an entire team staffed up just to answer questions and troubleshoot issues with their homegrown Docker replacement, and the end result will be that the team gets laid off and the company just buys licenses because that is far cheaper.
- tester457 4y ago> For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time. Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.
- mbreese 4y agoAnd people (including developers) aren’t always rational actors that act logically. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of fairness at play when something that was once free is no longer free. People aren’t entitled to a free lunch, but once you have it, it’s hard to take it away. Things like this can make even the most logical people act counterintuitively.
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- keewee7 4y agoThis article from 2013 might give an indication on why some people choose FOSS even when they can afford the non-FOSS solutions: The licensing. My God, the licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal, mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making sure all your software is properly licensed: determining what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait, what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was attacked by rabid licensing weasels. I'm not inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of software, but if anything kills off commercial software, let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle itself to death on its own licensing terms. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
- eastbound 4y agoNote that the Cloud resolves licensing in that you can’t consume resources you’re not licensed for (although “uncapped cloud” lets you consume resources that you don’t know are paying for).
- musicale 4y agoI concur. It just reduces friction and overhead. However license management and compliance might be easier if you go with apps from an app store like Apple/MS/Steam/etc..
- Daub 4y agoAgreed. This effects everyone, event At a simple user level. We have access to Adobe Creative Cloud at uni. Every time I walk into a new classroom, I need to go through the creative cloud academicc licence dance. Sign in, sign out, sign in again, Singh out again la la la.
- yunohn 4y agoDocket licensing is significantly simpler than that codinghorror outrage article. https://www.docker.com/pricing/ https://www.docker.com/pricing/
- ilyt 4y ago> that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year. the 250 person companies are not building the replacement, the 2k+ ones will. And likely ones that fit their internal architecture better so there are productivity gains to be had on top of that
- dathinab 4y agoand they are also building replacements because it's beneficial for their business for various reasons
- HatchedLake721 4y agoAmen. This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. “Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.” “$9 p/m???” - asked a developer choking on their avocado toast “That’s the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the same thing myself in 2 weeks.” 2 months later. "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
- paxys 4y ago> 2 months later. > "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m." That is wildly optimistic.
- doctor_eval 4y ago> almost done The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
- skywhopper 4y agoIn my experience it’s not developers who balk at such fees. Management gets very nervous about every $5 and $10/month tool that folks want to use and regularly insists on trimming seats.
- dijit 4y agoIts not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries. I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs: Gitlab: 19/m Docker: 24/m Slack: 12.5/m Copilot: 19/m Office: 12.5/m Tailscale: 15/m oslash: 6/mo pagerduty: 41/m Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m Calendly: 16/m Bonusly: 4.5/m Snyk: 98/m Figma: 42/m Lens: 20/m Postman: 29/m Sourcegraph: 99/m Jetbrains: 1xIDE: 23/m or: Jetbrains: All: 78/m This is obviously a non-exhaustive list, and isn’t the highest subscription tiers; its the first ones offering SSO, or that permit a mid-sized group. That doesnt take into account other specialised tools like Perforce (huge cost) or Teletrik: $1,299/y This also doesn't take into account that you sometimes need to buy seats in batches of 5, or if you have an overlap of people for even a day that then you must buy a license for the whole period. So there can easily be overages. So, $490~ is the minimum per seat cost in my org, (there are other licenses that I cant think about right now, including docusign for example, and it doesn't include perforce). That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
- jvanderbot 4y agoN employees, M internal tooling maintenance cost, Y for years. 120 * N * Y vs M * Y looks very attractive for large N and small M, esp when that 120 may suddenly increase without warning (again). It's still just math.
- dathinab 4y agoI think you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but outside of the US this level of payment is reserved to a small number of senior developer. Through that doesn't really change your arguments point. Through I also would argue that while some companies are tightly coupled to docker desktop many others are not (and can easily migrate) or need to migrate to other tooling for other non-payment reasons. If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1). (1): Through that is only on Linux and it's not a clear cut "this is better" but more a "subtle differences can make it much better but also worse depending on what you do/are looking for".
- skissane 4y ago> If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1). > (1): Through that is only on Linux If you only need Docker CLI on Linux, the open source version of Docker works fine, so you don’t need any alternative to the proprietary licensed Docker The problem I saw firsthand in moving off Docker Desktop for Mac, is (last I checked) nothing else had as seamless networking and filesystem integration on Mac as Docker Desktop does. Funnily enough the Docker Desktop networking stuff is open source (VPNKit), but at the time nobody else seemed to have integrated it with the open source bits of Docker in a way which just worked. With Docker Desktop for Mac, our Gradle scripts which created Docker containers on the Linux CI infrastructure worked unchanged on macOS. We tried moving to minikube or podman and with both we lost that
- coffee33go 4y ago> you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but o True. Also these $150k+/yr devs are the ones that eventually roll out the next opensource docker replacement...
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- rhaway84773 4y agoFor my company which went from its internal hand rolled ticketing system to Jira, Azure, etc. the big issue is that our hand rolled system, even though it had limited features, was significantly more suited to our needs. It was much faster, had the exact fields we needed, and the exact workflow we wanted. It provided email alerts using the rules thst made sense for us and did I mention it was ridiculously faster? We went from a single developer probably spending a few weeks in a year to maintain/augment a ticketing system that worked really great for us, to paying hundreds of thousands for something that doesn’t work well at all.
- kiratp 4y agoSometimes it’s better to just change your workflow to match the tool if that avoids you having to build and maintain your own ticketing system
- figassis 4y agoProblem with this is false advertising. Often, you buy a tool because its website says can do A and B, and do does the sales rep. Then you deploy it and realize it really only does C, and if you squint at it hard enough you can kinda see A and B if you pay extra and spend months customizing it. Growth at all costs mindset makes companies lie do they don’t lose a single lead, then try to lock/beat them into submission and pretend this was always the agreement.
- supportlocal4h 4y agoSure. You take the two ladies who built and maintain your homegrown system and you run them through 6 months of training on Actions and Pipelines and Agents along with two other employees, then give them a Director and an official dept like "DevOps". Now you're ready for a new workflow. See all the hassle and money you've saved?
- tough 4y agoCapitalism winning, it's sufferers loosing. Just another day
- orf 4y agoIt’s a bit different. The business pricing is 24 dollars a month, so with 150 employees you’re looking at 270,000 dollars a year for a MacOS desktop application. Nobody seriously cares about docker hub. Nobody cares about the SSO, or the access management, or SCIM. Nobody uses anything but the app that makes it simple to run stuff in MacOS. That’s not worth 270k a year.
- sac2171 4y agoIs your math right?
- SternenLuchs 4y agojust to fix a few assumptions as we are Migrating right now. we have roughly 160 developers, sso is a requirement so Business license it is. 160 x24 x12 = 46k + dealing with Budgets + sso Integration vs telling everyone to install colima, podman, whatever and replacing the commands. if you need 3 people to replace docker, I have no clue what you are doing.
- bruce511 4y agoThe math doesn't make sense, and that's why Docker is both successful now, and why the parent comment to yours is flawed. Always bear in mind that when "the Internet" complains about some minor price issue, it's usually individuals who are responding. Individuals tend to have limited cash, and all decisions are cash. They are time rich and cash poor. They run Linux on the desktop over Windows to "save money". [1] Most companies though are cash rich and time poor. If they can outsource a task for small money then they will. Yes, there's a place where the outsource cost is too high, but that's really high. They run windows on the desktop because that saves time. They'll continue to use docker because switching costs a lot of time. So Docker will do just fine. Companies are more than happy to spend money. See AWS as exhibit A. [1] there are many reasons to use a Linux desktop, saving money is the least interesting.
- berniedurfee 4y agoBut I want it for free as in Twitter! They should make their revenue by phoning home with private data they can exploit for revenue like everyone else. They could be a $1B company if they sold code snippets to MS to train their code generators. Yes… that was sarcasm. Ten bucks a month for the value that Docker brings is a fantastic deal. I regularly see people pay much more for far less.