5 ms·
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 h
by 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 agoTheir solution is not a monthly recurring event.
- kiratp 4y agoTheir solution will require a developer to ssh into VMs to update, debug, upscale etc.
- megous 4y agoThat'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 agoYeah, now its 24/7 ops headache.
- zeusk 4y agolike 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 agoOk, 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 agodon'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 agoDon't tell them it becomes 40k after taxes or people here won't believe you.
- Petersipoi 4y agoSoftware Engineers work for $40k net in Europe? Genuinely asking.
- XajniN 4y agoOnly if they have a good salary
- mettamage 4y agoYep, me, there's nothing that pays more to be honest. If you're hiring and it pays significantly more, I'm interested.
- deng 4y agoYes. 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 agoTo 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 agoA 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 agoHehe, 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 agoThat 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 agoI 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 agoThere 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.