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Yep, we haven’t been allowed to hire anyone new on my team in a year. Definitely no headcount for junior engineers. With the cost of licenses for SaaS apps for

by ams92 3y ago

Yep, we haven’t been allowed to hire anyone new on my team in a year. Definitely no headcount for junior engineers. With the cost of licenses for SaaS apps for a single developer my company would rather hire one senior engineer versus 2 juniors.

chadash 3y ago
Wow. What saas are you using that’s so expensive?
- wlonkly 3y ago
  In my experience it's the sum of them, rather than just one. I have at least a few dozen tiles in Okta.
api 3y ago
I remember years ago when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT. Now that the in house IT expertise is gone and the data is in closed SaaS you are locked in and it’s time to turn the screws.
- thfuran 3y ago
  The prices are definitely out of control if it's a significant fraction of the cost of a dev.
  - api 3y ago
    I’ve seen some crazy examples when things like Datadog become part of the stack or you have a really big “GitOps” operation with loads of SaaS things all chained together to deploy, audit, manage, etc. a build pipeline and a cloud deployment. Then there’s all the stuff like Zoom, Office, Google Workspace, and more that everyone needs. It can get crazy fast, and once you let stuff into the stack it’s hard to get rid of it. This is particularly true when it becomes part of a process that is in turn tied up with compliance or is used by a lot of people. Major source of “cost disease” creeping into our industry. I’ve taken to calling the overall phenomenon “low interest rate architecture.”
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      You may have a point there. I remember an exchange from a conversation I had with a recruiter a couple months ago where she talked about having to log in to literally 18 different systems to get her work done. Her company's solution was to implement SSO with Okta. Okta is not a bad product by any means, and it certainly does work well. But, if SaaS costs are the problem, going from having 18 logins to remember to having a single login while paying for 19 SaaS tools seems like the opposite of a good idea to me.
- mbrumlow 3y ago
  Actually it’s worse. We still hire in house It to work with all the vendors. They get paid the same as before.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT. I was amazed that anyone believed this at the start, and I'm even more amazed that anyone still believes it.
  - api 3y ago
    I never believed it. I remember telling people how this would turn out and getting kind of laughed at. This industry is so fad driven. When something is the fad in tech it becomes heresy to question it. I had a similar experience when everyone believed mobile would completely replace desktop/laptop systems. I explained why it wouldn’t, why it was for a different set of use cases, and was kind of scoffed at for that too.
    - vipermark7 3y ago
      The new generation has largely switched to exclusively using thier phones. I figure this will have some pretty negative consequences for computing, but was also inevitable given the state of things
      - api 3y ago
        People in the new generation who use computers to do real work don't use phones because you can't do very much in the way of real work on a phone. Developers also don't use phones because you can't develop (much) on a phone. They are pretty much pure consumption devices. What's happened is that the phone has replaced the PC for casual consumer-level computer use, except maybe high-end gaming.

by ams92 3y ago

chadash 3y ago

Wow. What saas are you using that’s so expensive?

wlonkly 3y ago
In my experience it's the sum of them, rather than just one. I have at least a few dozen tiles in Okta.

api 3y ago

I remember years ago when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT. Now that the in house IT expertise is gone and the data is in closed SaaS you are locked in and it’s time to turn the screws.

thfuran 3y ago
The prices are definitely out of control if it's a significant fraction of the cost of a dev.
- api 3y ago
  I’ve seen some crazy examples when things like Datadog become part of the stack or you have a really big “GitOps” operation with loads of SaaS things all chained together to deploy, audit, manage, etc. a build pipeline and a cloud deployment. Then there’s all the stuff like Zoom, Office, Google Workspace, and more that everyone needs. It can get crazy fast, and once you let stuff into the stack it’s hard to get rid of it. This is particularly true when it becomes part of a process that is in turn tied up with compliance or is used by a lot of people. Major source of “cost disease” creeping into our industry. I’ve taken to calling the overall phenomenon “low interest rate architecture.”
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    You may have a point there. I remember an exchange from a conversation I had with a recruiter a couple months ago where she talked about having to log in to literally 18 different systems to get her work done. Her company's solution was to implement SSO with Okta. Okta is not a bad product by any means, and it certainly does work well. But, if SaaS costs are the problem, going from having 18 logins to remember to having a single login while paying for 19 SaaS tools seems like the opposite of a good idea to me.
mbrumlow 3y ago
Actually it’s worse. We still hire in house It to work with all the vendors. They get paid the same as before.
JohnFen 3y ago
> when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT. I was amazed that anyone believed this at the start, and I'm even more amazed that anyone still believes it.
- api 3y ago
  I never believed it. I remember telling people how this would turn out and getting kind of laughed at. This industry is so fad driven. When something is the fad in tech it becomes heresy to question it. I had a similar experience when everyone believed mobile would completely replace desktop/laptop systems. I explained why it wouldn’t, why it was for a different set of use cases, and was kind of scoffed at for that too.
  - vipermark7 3y ago
    The new generation has largely switched to exclusively using thier phones. I figure this will have some pretty negative consequences for computing, but was also inevitable given the state of things
    - api 3y ago
      People in the new generation who use computers to do real work don't use phones because you can't do very much in the way of real work on a phone. Developers also don't use phones because you can't develop (much) on a phone. They are pretty much pure consumption devices. What's happened is that the phone has replaced the PC for casual consumer-level computer use, except maybe high-end gaming.