> I recommend spending some time in a big organisation
My very first comment started with "I'm really not cut out to work for a big company". I am well aware that I do not want to do this.
> After my time at Amazon, I gleefully pay for 1Password
But that's exactly the type of cultural issue that I am talking about. So many people going to work at FAANGs and when they leave they think that mentality should be applied everywhere.
The first issue in this thinking is straightforward: I know that in your mind your company is the greatest thing in the world, but it is not Amazon. YAGNI applies beyond software development.
The second problem: FAANGs can operate like this because they are making so much money per employee that it simply does not matter to them. But this mentality when applied to a smaller company, can be the difference between 6 months or 2 years of runway. And every time that a company outsources this is a missed opportunity to learn how to do it more effectively. Instead of thinking "this would keep me up at night", I'd rather think "we are doing it the hard way, but that makes us more resilient and increases our chance of survival".
At $15k/month per employee on salary alone, 1Password costs <0.1%. I’d argue the complete opposite of your conclusion: the smaller you are, the more important it is to focus exclusively on the things that move the needle. Reducing my employee cost by 0.1% does not move the needle. If I spend my time debating the merits of self hosting a password manager, I’m not spending my time growing my business.
The reason businesses like Amazon can be successful is because they focus on what matters, and that’s what startups need to embrace too.
It's 1Password, it's Jira, it's Github, it's Salesforce, it's Tableau, it's Google Docs, it's Dropbox, it's Figma. It's all the services that have viable alternatives, but you just don't want to try out because... it's easier to think it's not worth it?
> The reason businesses like Amazon can be successful is because they focus on what matters, and that’s what startups need to embrace too.
That says more about our different views of what constitutes "success" than anything.
I’ve been that IT guy that thinks like you do many years ago. I get it.
But then I became the boss. And we pay for many of the services you listed and more (google docs, gitlab, tailscale, 1password, JIRA, zendesk, Okta, gusto, quickbooks, etc, common tools used by startups). We have 11 employees.
I’ve spent more time typing this comment than the time I’ve ever spent wondering whether they’re worth the cost.
And they all total probably $200 a month per employee or more. And they still pale in comparison to our payroll.
They’re all no brainers especially given how small we are.
Those tools allow us to perform at the same level security and compliance-wise as much larger companies. And they liberate our time so we can focus on adding value to our customers rather than futzing around with unstable internal systems.
Again, I get it, the 80k number seems like a lot. What we’re all trying to tell you in different ways is that 80k is _nothing_ to a company with 10k employees. They probably spend that much on stationary and cleaning supplies.
We have been talking about two separate things, and I reckon they are getting conflated. To be more clear, one is about the "Closed SaaS" vs "Free Software SaaS", the other is "outsourcing vs doing in-house".
My argument is more against the former than the latter. And it's not just about cost. It's about lock-in. It's about shitty customer support that takes 11 days to respond to a ticket. It's about building your systems on the "no-brainer cloud provider" that leaves you empty handed on the semi-yearly outage, and all you can do is pray to be resolved it quickly and console yourself that your competitors are offline just like you.
The point on the second issue was not just "they could do it in-house and cheaper". It is also "they are paying this much money and they are still in a weak position, where they have no control about some critical piece of the organization. I would understand if someone takes this route as a temporary measure while better processes are being developed and putting in place, but if this paying $1M/year is accepted as the "natural way of things" of things, it seems like management is saying "we are incapable of doing it ourselves, and we are too lazy to even care. Let's just hope that the money keeps coming, and if doesn't we just lay some people off".
I realized about a decade ago that I don’t actually care about the code being open source as much. It’s the data and file formats that need to be open.
That way I have a path to migrate to a different product. That’s the true lock in for me.
Never noticed any difference or cared between gitlab being “open source” vs GitHub being closed source. As long as it’s an unaltered git repo and there are apis for my data.
If you use Github only for its repo hosting capabilities, sure. But there is CI, issue tracking, discussion history, the OAuth server and everything else that is built around the repo hosting and is used to lock people into the platform.
My very first comment started with "I'm really not cut out to work for a big company". I am well aware that I do not want to do this.
> After my time at Amazon, I gleefully pay for 1Password
But that's exactly the type of cultural issue that I am talking about. So many people going to work at FAANGs and when they leave they think that mentality should be applied everywhere.
The first issue in this thinking is straightforward: I know that in your mind your company is the greatest thing in the world, but it is not Amazon. YAGNI applies beyond software development.
The second problem: FAANGs can operate like this because they are making so much money per employee that it simply does not matter to them. But this mentality when applied to a smaller company, can be the difference between 6 months or 2 years of runway. And every time that a company outsources this is a missed opportunity to learn how to do it more effectively. Instead of thinking "this would keep me up at night", I'd rather think "we are doing it the hard way, but that makes us more resilient and increases our chance of survival".