5 ms·

Sure I love having someone else do work for me and paying them for that, the question is if that work is worth a 50x markup.

fragmede 1y ago
Yeah, but then we're just haggling. If you know how to change the belt on your car and already have the tools, it's different from when you're stranded with no tools and no garage and no belt.
- rikafurude21 1y ago
  If you're a mechanic you're supposed to know how to change the belt on your car. It would be insane if you write code and work with computers for a living but you dont know how to set up a web server.
  - everyone 1y ago
    It would be insane if you write code and work with computers for a living but you dont know how to write a game engine in assembly.
    - sgarland 1y ago
      Installing a web server is in no way the same as writing a game engine, let alone in assembly, and I think you know that.
      - everyone 1y ago
        Fucking every web-dev assumes web-dev is all of programming. I have always been a game dev, never done any internety stuff, I was never interested in it. I would defo find the game engine task a lot easier. I already know what I would do. I wouldnt know where to start with the server + I dont know what the "gotchas" are. If I was forced to do that I would schedule a really long time for it.
        sgarland 1y ago
        I don’t assume that (and am not a dev - DBRE / SRE) at all. I have massive respect for game devs, since you’re one of the few subsets that seems to give a shit about performance. I bet you could figure out `apt install nginx` and a basic config pretty quickly, definitely faster than a web dev could learn game programming. “What do you mean, I have to finish each loop in 16 msec?”
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      Hum... Writing a game engine is a high-difficulty task that should be available to any reasonably good software developer with a few months to study for it. Making it in assembly is a sure way to take 10 times the time of another low level language like C, but shouldn't be an impossibility either. Configuring a web server is a low-difficulty task that should be available for any good software developer with 3 days to study for it. It's absurd for a developer to need to configure a web server, but insist on paying a large rent and cede control to some 3rd party instead of just doing it.
  - auggierose 1y ago
    I am pretty sure I know much more about code than you do, and at the same time you probably know much more about web servers and sysadmin than I do. I don't mind if it stays like that. And I am saying this having programmed my own web server in Java about 25 years ago.
  - rascul 1y ago
    A whole lot of coding and working with computers doesn't involve setting up a web server. It's not insane at all.
alwa 1y ago
Flour, salt, and water are exceedingly cheap. I have to imagine the loaf of bread I buy from my baker reflects considerably more than a 50x markup compared to baking my own. It’s a lot cheaper than me learning to bake as well as he does—not to mention dedicating the time every day to get my daily bread—and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.
- mediaman 1y ago
  Bread is a great example! You can buy a loaf for $3-4. It is not a 50x markup. Like growing your own veggies, baking bread is for fun, not for economics. But the cloud is different. None of the financial scale benefits are passed on to you. You save serious money running it in-house. The arguments around scale have no validity for the vast, vast majority of use cases. Vercel isn't selling bread: they're selling a fancy steak dinner, and yes, you can make steak at home for much less, and if you eat fancy steak dinners at fancy restaurants every night you're going to go broke. So the key is to understand whether your vendors are selling you bread, or a fancy steak dinner, and to not make the mistake of getting the two confused.
  - alwa 1y ago
    That’s a tremendously clarifying framework, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you. I wonder, though—at the risk of overextending the metaphor—what if I don’t have a kitchen, but I need the lunch meeting to be fed? Wouldn’t (relatively expensive) catering routinely make sense? And isn’t the difference between having steak catered and having sandwiches catered relatively small compared to the alternative of building out a kitchen? What if my business is not meaningfully technical: I’ll set up applications to support our primary function, and they might even be essential to the meat of our work. But essential in the same way water and power are: we only notice it when it’s screwed up. Day-to-day, our operational competency is in dispatching vehicles or making sandwiches or something. If we hired somebody with the expertise to maintain things, they’d sit idle—or need a retainer commensurate with what the Vercels and Herokus of the world are charging. We only need to think about the IT stuff when it breaks—and maybe to the extent that, when we expect a spike, we can click one button to have twice as much “application.” In that case, isn’t it conceivable that it could be worth the premium to buy our way out of managing some portion of the lower levels of the stack?

fragmede 1y ago

Yeah, but then we're just haggling. If you know how to change the belt on your car and already have the tools, it's different from when you're stranded with no tools and no garage and no belt.

rikafurude21 1y ago
If you're a mechanic you're supposed to know how to change the belt on your car. It would be insane if you write code and work with computers for a living but you dont know how to set up a web server.
- everyone 1y ago
  It would be insane if you write code and work with computers for a living but you dont know how to write a game engine in assembly.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    Installing a web server is in no way the same as writing a game engine, let alone in assembly, and I think you know that.
    - everyone 1y ago
      Fucking every web-dev assumes web-dev is all of programming. I have always been a game dev, never done any internety stuff, I was never interested in it. I would defo find the game engine task a lot easier. I already know what I would do. I wouldnt know where to start with the server + I dont know what the "gotchas" are. If I was forced to do that I would schedule a really long time for it.
      - sgarland 1y ago
        I don’t assume that (and am not a dev - DBRE / SRE) at all. I have massive respect for game devs, since you’re one of the few subsets that seems to give a shit about performance. I bet you could figure out `apt install nginx` and a basic config pretty quickly, definitely faster than a web dev could learn game programming. “What do you mean, I have to finish each loop in 16 msec?”
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    Hum... Writing a game engine is a high-difficulty task that should be available to any reasonably good software developer with a few months to study for it. Making it in assembly is a sure way to take 10 times the time of another low level language like C, but shouldn't be an impossibility either. Configuring a web server is a low-difficulty task that should be available for any good software developer with 3 days to study for it. It's absurd for a developer to need to configure a web server, but insist on paying a large rent and cede control to some 3rd party instead of just doing it.
- auggierose 1y ago
  I am pretty sure I know much more about code than you do, and at the same time you probably know much more about web servers and sysadmin than I do. I don't mind if it stays like that. And I am saying this having programmed my own web server in Java about 25 years ago.
- rascul 1y ago
  A whole lot of coding and working with computers doesn't involve setting up a web server. It's not insane at all.

alwa 1y ago

Flour, salt, and water are exceedingly cheap. I have to imagine the loaf of bread I buy from my baker reflects considerably more than a 50x markup compared to baking my own. It’s a lot cheaper than me learning to bake as well as he does—not to mention dedicating the time every day to get my daily bread—and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.

mediaman 1y ago
Bread is a great example! You can buy a loaf for $3-4. It is not a 50x markup. Like growing your own veggies, baking bread is for fun, not for economics. But the cloud is different. None of the financial scale benefits are passed on to you. You save serious money running it in-house. The arguments around scale have no validity for the vast, vast majority of use cases. Vercel isn't selling bread: they're selling a fancy steak dinner, and yes, you can make steak at home for much less, and if you eat fancy steak dinners at fancy restaurants every night you're going to go broke. So the key is to understand whether your vendors are selling you bread, or a fancy steak dinner, and to not make the mistake of getting the two confused.
- alwa 1y ago
  That’s a tremendously clarifying framework, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you. I wonder, though—at the risk of overextending the metaphor—what if I don’t have a kitchen, but I need the lunch meeting to be fed? Wouldn’t (relatively expensive) catering routinely make sense? And isn’t the difference between having steak catered and having sandwiches catered relatively small compared to the alternative of building out a kitchen? What if my business is not meaningfully technical: I’ll set up applications to support our primary function, and they might even be essential to the meat of our work. But essential in the same way water and power are: we only notice it when it’s screwed up. Day-to-day, our operational competency is in dispatching vehicles or making sandwiches or something. If we hired somebody with the expertise to maintain things, they’d sit idle—or need a retainer commensurate with what the Vercels and Herokus of the world are charging. We only need to think about the IT stuff when it breaks—and maybe to the extent that, when we expect a spike, we can click one button to have twice as much “application.” In that case, isn’t it conceivable that it could be worth the premium to buy our way out of managing some portion of the lower levels of the stack?