7 ms·

At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl

• conanbatt 4y ago
  2.5k doesn't pay 1 day of a developer in a top-of-market startup.
  • ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
    I need to up my rate :D
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• kiratp 4y ago
  A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost. 49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour. 29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself. This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.
  • zeusk 4y ago
    Their solution is not a monthly recurring event.
    • kiratp 4y ago
      Their solution will require a developer to ssh into VMs to update, debug, upscale etc.
      • megous 4y ago
        That's about ~1-2 hours a year and already has to be done, because that VM has been used to run other dev services. Also with simple solutions, the benefit is that there's usually nothing to debug. It just works. And the cost of that has to be compared to cost of gitlab subscription and other gitlab related headaches.
    • jayd16 4y ago
      Yeah, now its 24/7 ops headache.
      • zeusk 4y ago
        like gitlab isn't?
  • skeeter2020 4y ago
    >> A developer costs about 250K a year all up. Gotta love HN math. Calculations to two decimal places, starting with a number plucked from the high end of a distribution with standard deviation of at least 100K.
    • jdminhbg 4y ago
      > the high end of a distribution What a dev costs is not the same as what an advertised salary for a dev is. This is closer to the middle of the distribution for dev costs in the US.
    • kiratp 4y ago
      Ok, so at 80K a year, that’s a 3x multiplier. So annually you have to spend < 3*19 = 57 hours on your custom built source control and CI to come out on top. Can’t be done outside of “we hired the OG devs of Gitlab/hub/etc”
      • grogenaut 4y ago
        don't forget benefits, hardware, support staff portion, and possibly office. We typically calculate 50% over... so that's 120k at a likely low end. we run ghe at work and I know we spend 8 hours 4+ times a year for a test upgrade and then an upgrade from an eng that makes above either of your estimates in salary alone. None of this includes all the work we're not doing to build new integrations or features in the ci system that we get for pay for the product. But we're not a scrappy startup either. We're paying down much of the tech debt from being a scrappy startup, it's not been cheap.
  • mettamage 4y ago
    > A developer costs about 250K a year all up. I currently cost more like 80K in euro's if I reason from my employer's side. So tell me, how are you getting to the 250K exactly? Europe exists as well and even in the US there are enough companies that don't pay FAANG salaries.
    • meghan_rain 4y ago
      Don't tell them it becomes 40k after taxes or people here won't believe you.
      • Petersipoi 4y ago
        Software Engineers work for $40k net in Europe? Genuinely asking.
        • XajniN 4y ago
          Only if they have a good salary
        • mettamage 4y ago
          Yep, me, there's nothing that pays more to be honest. If you're hiring and it pays significantly more, I'm interested.
        • deng 4y ago
          Yes. In Germany, if you are a good earner, you pay 42% taxes, plus obligatory healthcare about 900EUR/month, pension fund and unemployment insurance (also all obligatory). So if you earn 100k (which is already a high salary in Germany), you usually end up with less than half net. I know this sounds crazy to US citizens, but this system comes with several advantages which I wouldn't want to miss.
          • mettamage 4y ago
            To be honest, I feel Europeans are simply being underpaid compared to US FAANG salaries. Not necessarily compared to EU FAANG salaries as they are lower and even if that's case, it's not glaringly obvious (to me at least).
  • strken 4y ago
    A developer: in the US in specific rich cities in California, New York, Texas, Washington, and Colorado at a handful of tech companies which are currently bedevilled by lay-offs averaged across all roles GitLab doesn't have regional pricing.
  • megous 4y ago
    Hehe, even at US prices we'd break even after half a year. Average salary where I live is $21k/yr with average devs taking maybe $25-40k/yr. Top jobs being ~$65k
  • tjoff 4y ago
    That assume that gitlab is friction free and takes zero time to use? Maybe something like gitea+teamcity solution is better and cheaper and has less opportunity cost? I like gitlab, but it feels they have been walking in the wrong direction for many many years and the consequences are starting to pile up.
  • gbourne 4y ago
    I think the point is too many times developers are a penny wise and a pound foolish when it comes to build vs buy. Because they can build, and it is often fun if you haven't done it before. Though I often don't take my own advice, I try to ask is what I'm about to build core to our ROI/product, is there an existing solution that gets us 80% there, and yes, what is the cost. If it is not core to the business, won't drive revenue, and cost are not outrageous, which is a company by company truth, then I much prefer to spend X time building new product than recreating an existing product/tool. One final point - don't forget to consider the maintenance costs, which in the long term often greater then the initial investment. If your CI goes down, you just blew away and savings you were planning on.
    • lazypenguin 4y ago
      There are also maintenance costs with the off the shelf solutions. E.g. Gitlab self-hosted runners don’t handle very large artifacts well and frequently caused CI to timeout. We had to roll our own artifact management system. In general I agree with you off-the-shelf is usually better but sometimes a custom tailored solution rather than a generic system can be better.
• meghan_rain 4y ago
  The classic HN Dropbox comment, never gets old.
  • megous 4y ago
    Yes, but all we used gitlab for was git repo hosting with push access control for about 40 repositories to allow sharing code via push/pull and not much else (almost no issues/pull requests). It's ridiculous to pay $2500/yr so that 7 people can do push/pull over slow growing set of ~200MiB of data when it can be handled in much more performant way by a 36$/yr (+ a small one time setup cost) VM we already had for running other things.
    • koolba 4y ago
      Why were you paying for it then? GitLab has a CE version that’s free for commercial use. It sounds like you just want a pretty interface for git repos with some merge flow.
      • megous 4y ago
        Running gitlab yourself is just too expensive. Too many docs to read, hard to understand, just too much software in general (just compressed deb package alone is 1GiB in size), hard to backup, hard to debug issues, would require a new separate much more expensive VM, etc. It does weird shit during installation, like contacting letsencrypt and trying to fetch a certificate and failing if the machine is IPv6 only, etc. etc. Recovering from that is not documented anywhere. Too many moving parts. Just sort of blergh for people who like simple solutions. It doesn't sound like a 1-2hr/year self support software.
  • deathanatos 4y ago
    … sometimes, I do think it's merited. We switched to Github Actions for our CI and it's been … mixed. It was a hell of a lot of work to switch (GHA is significantly different than what we were moving from and … buggy) and even then, some of the pricing on GHA high. 24¢/GiB/mo for storage[1] which is like 8×? 10×? the sort of cloud baseline, 50¢/GiB data transfer [2], and the runners are similarly costly, IMO. I'm not sure if GHA wins out, in part because we're not done switching. You can do self-hosted runners aaaand… welcome to infra/ops? A little NIH syndrome would do the industry good. We need more stuff invented. The current stuff is mediocre. [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-github-packages/about-billing-for-github-packages https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-gith... [2]: I think it's only egress, and only from packages though?
• mardifoufs 4y ago
  I mean I dislike the gitlab pricing increases, and we are kind of regretting sticking with them (especially since everyone on the Gitlab instance has to pay for a seat, even when not using any of the premium features) considering how Github is cheaper and has a higher release velocity at this point... But to be very fair, we never saw what you describe about memory leaks or slow ruby services. Migrations are also usually silent and done in the background. I guess the software itself is pretty heavy, but predictably so (RAM usage rarely spikes, for example). We have a 400+ seats instance, with a decade worth of code and it just works 99.99% of the time, and upgrades are generally painless. Though our instance is pretty vanilla, and internal to our corporation. The runners are more finnicky and buggier, especially since we have tons of different build targets but that's besides the point if we are just talking about using it as a dumb git repo. And if you only need it for that purpose why even pay instead of using the community edition? (I'm in the AI team but I sometimes help the devops team that takes care of the instance to customize our AI pipelines, so I'm familiar with gitlab and with my colleagues experience with it)
  • megous 4y ago
    My bad experience was mostly just with installing gitlab on a 1GiB RAM VM, to see how it will fare and how easy it is to manage. I expect it to work for people who don't mind throwing a 16GiB+ RAM machine at it. But our dataset is currently like ~200 MiB and simple relatively dumb git hosting just works much better in our case.
    • jcrawfordor 4y ago
      GitLab should run fine on a machine with 4GB memory - this is the smallest recommended memory allocation, spec'd for up to 500 users. 2GB tends to work okay for testing but 1GB is indeed probably too small for all of the services to start. Postgres actually tends to be the long pole in the tent on small systems.
      • deng 4y ago
        Sorry, but the recommended system requirements are an absolute joke. They might be OK if you really only do pure code hosting and don't use CI, container/package registries, project planning features and whatnot, but on our instance with 400 users, the sidekiq background jobs alone easily eat 12GB RAM (I had to extend sidekiq to 4 processes just to deal with the load, otherwise GitLab would become unresponsive).
• argella 4y ago
  Why don’t you just run gitlab community edition or gitea
  • megous 4y ago
    Gitlab is massive piece of software, and has inordinate HW requirements for the job we'd be using it for. Also it would not run on the VM we already have set up for other services, backed up, etc. Gitea is fun and all, but it's not in debian repo, so would require manual updates. Annoying.
• onion2k 4y ago
  The problem with a homegrown system is that every developer working within it will see it as a barrier rather than a cost saving. Whenever they can't do something that's trivial on Github/Gitlab it'll be a reminder that the company would rather save $xxx/year than make their job easier. Ultimately, having a simple, well-integrated, industry standard stack that includes the same tooling every other company uses is a perk of working at a well-funded or profitable company. People leave for less.
  • hamandcheese 4y ago
    > it'll be a reminder that the company would rather save $xxx/year than make their job easier. My company has already made this crystal clear by switching to MS Teams.
    • cwsx 4y ago
      Every morning we begin stand-up with a ritual, our whole team simultaneously muttering something arcane whilst manipulating the inner workings of Teams, hoping to appease the MS gods. Shortly after the ritual is complete you hear a cacophony of "fucking teams wouldn't find my headset/camera", and the day begins.
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        Your team should have a strict policy to not do ANY work at all each day until the stand-up is complete, and not to do the stand-up until Teams is working correctly for every team member, no matter how long this takes.
        • cwsx 4y ago
          If only I could, I could use some time off...
  • deleted 4y ago
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