4 ms·

I've always been annoyed that companies will pay 6 figures for a support contract, but won't consider hiring a full time engineer for the same or less pay to su

• Dalewyn 3y ago
  If you hire an engineer, the liability is your problem. If you donate to open source, liability is still your problem. Both of these situations are patently unpalatable for most businesses. Meanwhile, if you pay someone for a support contract the liability is their problem. You see, whether a problem that comes up is fixed is actually irrelevant. The real question is how much liability you can get rid of.
  • bd30 3y ago
    I understand the full time engineer thing. But it was never explained to me at any of the places I have been at that it was a liability thing. At every place they thought we would leak trade secrets. Was always frustrating that technically we could never even contribute the most minor of bug fixes.
    • fsckboy 3y ago
      maybe it's a "blame" thing, but it's not a liability thing. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM*, but nobody ever got a nickel back either. *IBM is a consulting firm now
  • resoluteteeth 3y ago
    What liability are you referring to?
    • beachy 3y ago
      e.g. if you direct the engineer you have hired to build something that turns out to infringe on someone else's BS patents.
    • andyst 3y ago
      in the event of an incident, the exec or departments reputational liability
    • GeneralMayhem 3y ago
      Component breaks due to bug, deployment misconfiguration, scaling failure, etc., and your company loses $1M during the outage. If it's a vendor with an SLA, you can (sometimes) get them to cover the $1M. If it's in-house, you're eating it. It's often cheaper to build/run stuff yourself (unless it's so commodified that you're benefiting from amortization across the vendor's many clients), but then you have to be self-insured for problems.
      • jcrben 3y ago
        I don't think liability payments are that common. As someone who helps in analyzing software purchase decisions, it's certainly not something I hear people bring as a major factor.
        • eep_social 3y ago
          Maybe size of enterprise matters? I work in $LargeCorp and legal was very aggressive about insurance and liability redlines on the last contract I had to deal with.
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
          • jcrben 3y ago
            Why would a SaaS provider expose themselves to catastrophic risk of reimbursing a large enterprise for the enterprise's lost profits due to downtime? I think refunds of the cost of the SaaS are sort of common, but that's quite different and capped. "Oracle offers no financial compensation (e.g., credits, refunds or otherwise) in the event a Service Level Objective is missed." https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Reference/servicelevelobjectives.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Reference...
  • ilyt 3y ago
    Good luck trying to get any actual liability out of them... Like, go try to make Oracle write you a contract where their base going down compensates your lost profits. You just won't get it, unless you throw some hideous amount of money their way (and they will just pay insurance company and pocket the rest).
    • mouse_ 3y ago
      It's not about compensation, it's about finger-pointing. "WE didn't bill your card 40 times draining your bank account -- STRIPE did! Go sue them, not us!"
      • numbsafari 3y ago
        You are still getting sued.
        • jiggawatts 3y ago
          It's a theoretical benefit, not a real one, and the scenario is so rare that most people don't think of it critically. It's like buying insurance against "damage by asteroids". E.g.: "We can just sue Microsoft" is a common one. a) Their SLA literally states that they will compensate you only for the cost of the individual service they provided. The $1/month Azure DNS Zone outage caused your $100M/month business to vanish off the Internet? Here's $1 for your compensation! b) The US Government sued Microsoft and failed to get very far. Are you the US Government? Do you have a budget for dozens of the best lawyers money can buy? Have you sued a multi-trillion dollar market cap org successfully ever? No? Why do you think you can... and win? Generally this boils down to: "I haven't read the contract I signed, but I'm sure if things go bad I can just make the lawyers magically fix things for me."
          • numbsafari 3y ago
            Most customers won't sue you. They'll terminate their business with you and go elsewhere. You have to decide, as a business, if trustworthy vendors are available and select the right one. You can also decide that it's important enough to your value proposition that you want to "own" it. The real reason companies hire vendors is that you don't need some mythical "FTE" that can do all the things. For the "price of a single FTE", a vendor can provide you access to a range of FTEs that are knowledgeable and capable in different domains, and you can flex between them. Thinking about RedHat, as an example, if you pay RedHat the equivalent of a single FTE, let's say $300k/yr, is that just one FTE working on maintaining Apache? A kernel contributor? GCC? This is about fractionalization and labor specialization, not some direct 1:1 tradeoff between hiring some mythical person with commit bits in hundreds or thousands of OSS trees.
  • yoyohello13 3y ago
    Whatever anyone else is saying this is the real reason. I’ve seen it first hand many time. The only thing that matters is being able to blame somebody else when problems arise.
• liquidpele 3y ago
  Same reason it’s easier to get contractors or backfill instead of giving raises… HR makes it a pita for managers to do it.
• NegativeK 3y ago
  It can sometimes be way easier to fire a vendor than an engineer.
  • imbnwa 3y ago
    Why?
    • marpstar 3y ago
      You don't provide health insurance to vendors.
    • thechao 3y ago
      Contracts are usually of fixed, short, duration — 6 or 12 months. You just stop renewing the contract. Employees are forever.
    • jprete 3y ago
      Employees gets legal protections that contractors can only dream of. Also, most contracts have specific terms of completion and duration. If the contractor screws up, you can sue them, withhold payments for lack of specific deliverables, or just let the contract run out.
    • paulddraper 3y ago
      Firing is costly to morale, and carries legal risks. Not renewing a vendor contract is easy.
  • mcdonje 3y ago
    But it's often easier to replace an engineer than a vendor.
    • est31 3y ago
      engineers who work in large teams on some component, talk about the design with their managers? Yes you can replace them. Firing the maintainer and author of 90% of the commits of the OSS project your company is relying on in a way that it is hard to migrate away? Who can replace them??
• hinkley 3y ago
  - Vendor contracts are hard - So we avoid doing them - So we never get good at them - So every contract is a painful lesson in trying Open source wins because I don't have to involve the entire company to use it. I can literally just raise my voice to see if anyone in the group cares and then use it. And even when it's free for small companies, not approving a license is holding up something that we think is already done, so the wheels grind a bit faster.
  • pylua 3y ago
    In many companies I expect at least a security review of the open source before developers can use it. This can have a lot of red tape.
    • toomuchtodo 3y ago
      This is why a SaaS offering is a must. For open source, a security review might be needed. For a SaaS, checkbox SOC2 and we’re on our way. Leverage to reduce the B2B sales cycle as you scale.
    • MilStdJunkie 3y ago
      Yes. Yes. Absolutely. This can stop adoption right in its tracks, and it depends entirely on one or two personalities. Who's at the wheel in office InfoSec. One guy had a strict "Open Source is Inherently Unstable" red line, sooooooooo . . well, we went two levels above him to get OSS signed off on, because the parent org was all about OSS. Doing that was a bad career decision, but it was the right one. This article gets it right almost exactly; transparency was a huge part of adoption, but the extensibility thing is also a big deal for a niche industry. Also, our vendor was unspeakable, disappearing for years on end, re-appearing as another company, asking fifty times the money for no reason.
    • devoutsalsa 3y ago
      I wonder if there’s a business model around sharing the results of security reviews. Even if Company A can’t fully trust the review of Company B, you could A could provide a lot of context for B to reduce the cost of starting an evaluation from zero.
• version_five 3y ago
  Your company needs the maturity to manage that engineer. Companies with products have customer success and sales etc and their own engineering management and product hierarchy to translate your end user issue into a software fix. That doesn't happen automatically by staffing and engineer in house. How would a company even figure out the profile they need?
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I hear logic like this and suddenly I 100% understand how a startup can "disrupt the industry", even if 90+% of the time that is a huge exageration, if not an outright lie someone promises in a pitch. I guess if they can't find that lead, the lead will find, or rather found, a company for such a need. And I guess paradoxically, this is exactly how contracting firms form to begin with. So I guess startup culture isn't really that new.
  • justinclift 3y ago
    > How would a company even figure out the profile they need? Generally by asking the existing developers of the software project in question. Some of them might be the person you'd end up hiring anyway.
• debarshri 3y ago
  I am engineer, now trying to sell enterprise software. May be I can shed some light. If a company says it is not their current focus even after paying 200k, you should looking into finding an alternative vendor who is willing to go above and beyond. A good vendor gets you by features and keeps you with exceptional service. I have seen vendors saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. In my opinion orgs should have service contract. It is more important when you are responding to RFP and you are a b2b org. If you dont have a service contract for tools and service you use, you will run into liabilities that you don't own and can delegate it to the vendor.
  • jiggawatts 3y ago
    > saying that those words when they are in extraction mode. These words were almost verbatim used this morning in a meeting. A small agile ISV was purchased by one of those big "holding companies" and now everything is "for consideration", "not on the roadmap", "not strictly required", or like you said "not their current focus". We've been raising issues like: "You're using frameworks and SDKs that went end-of-life years ago for Internet-facing security-critical components, how is that not your current focus!?" and hearing crickets in response. Support contract is in place, but there's no specific clause requiring them to do their job, so they're not doing it.
    • debarshri 3y ago
      I think you are not the target customer that the holding companies is looking for. I would try to see an out and look for another vendor, tool or alternative.
      • jiggawatts 3y ago
        Too much lock-in due to extensive customisations — which is precisely why the small ISV was a lucrative purchase for the holding company. They can safely milk their customers for enough years to recoup the investment.
      • lmm 3y ago
• paxys 3y ago
  By that line of reasoning software companies should not be a thing at all and everyone should hire engineers and write all their software in-house. Hiring and maintaining a team of developers is hard, especially if the problem they are solving is not in your domain. Contracting a problem out to specialists is most often the more sensible option for both parties.
  • lmm 3y ago
    Buying off the shelf software is reasonable. Outsourcing for expertise - whether that's having an external party write software for you, customize existing software for you, or something else - usually fails, IME.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• patmorgan23 3y ago
  "The support contracts are often disappointing too, like you are paying $200,000+ a year for the stupid thing and they won't even fix your problems? "That product is not our current area of focus". So frustrating. " Isn't the next part of this where the vendor receives an angry letter that contains the words "notice of default" and "filing suit to compel specific performance". If a vendor takes your money and says "JK we don't feel like doing that" and your contract let's them do that you need to fire you attorney (or who ever signed that contract)