A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools | Hacker News Reader

A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

acrossapp.com

834 pointsksj2114453 comments

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy.

E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id). Six months after signing a 3-year agreement (my bad. rookie mistake) I had to resist my CEO’s insistence that we switch to a different provider when we were courting them as a client. A few month later, sales went out and bought 10 mf’ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone because some client hadn’t heard of UC and asked if it was the budget solution.

Thank god our new CFO confiscated all the corporate credit cards and moved us to reimbursement with Concur. Of course, he later unilaterally selected NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!) and insisted on coordinating the roll out himself. It has been a months long dumpster fire, but he still won’t give my team admin privileges lest we try to see other’s salaries.

We use a lot of AWS. One of our red-teamers mostly used but occasionally built some of our infrastructure. He left the company last month. Yesterday, salesman from Digital Ocean reached to ask if we are still interested in going forward with the departed colleague’s plan to move all our infrastructure to DO.

So for all you folks stuck in big companies, when you wonder why your IT department is so behind the times and won’t let you use Postgres instead of MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.

(All that said, my job isn’t bad and my company is way less dysfunctional than most start ups. I get that start ups are chaotic, and the basic nature of my job is to wrangle it.)

Seems like there should be some basic review processes in place. Any external dependency/purchase should require sign-off of at least one of only a few decision makers.

This should be very similar to a code review, but seen by CTO, CIO, and CEO (whichever combination is most relevant) so that big unexpected, costly structural changes don't cost long term disfunction and pain.

Wonder if there's software for organisational management? Any ticket tracker could probably do.

Trackers are for management to control the plebs. Rules don't apply to execs.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

> (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id)

in our case, UC constantly failed hard to properly encode an essentially static excel sheet over screen share - jpeg artifacts the size of basketballs that never went away, even when given infinite time to "catch up". zoom has zero issues with screen share, but randomly drops calls, and yeah the phone + 9 digit id + participant id feels intentionally user-hostile (especially having to repeat that bs again after a dropped call).

That's weird about Zoom. We have whomever is scheduling the meeting paste their personal meeting ID into the meeting invite. It's one click for anyone joining, including the host.

Maybe if you literally call in to the conference? Not sure why you’d ever want to do that, but...

You can have zoom call you, making the whole “too many numbers” thing irrelevant.

I think your plan has to support the outbound calling, our Corp issued plans do but the random 3rd zoom bridge I join doesn’t always have the call me option. It may be free tier vs paid; but has bit me right before trying to jump on and having to dial in manually.

Eh, the problem with the "IT department dictates all the choices because the devs are stupid" approach is that it takes ownership away from the devs, therefore leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I can't be trusted to make technology decisions for the system I know about (and the IT department knows nothing about), then why should I care about delivering the best possible product?

Sorry, I've seen exactly that pattern happen in my (still) current company and it just leads to teams that are completely unable to think for themselves and work like machines in a cog.

I'm not saying company guidelines shouldn't exist or that you should allow a proliferation of 200 different programming languages, but I have never seen the "devs are stupid" approach work; if this is indeed a problem in your org, hire better people! (Which doesn't mean: smarter hackers. It means: responsible, professional individuals that work well together in a highly effective team and can be trusted to make decisions in the best interest of the product.)

I think both view points are true.

- In orgs that don't trust dev typically have significantly less understanding of dev, and in my experience have really poor security postures. Everything is a slow manual process decided by people who don't understand apps or automation.

- In orgs that trust dev too much, you usually get a federated architecture that doesn't make any sense from a strategy point of you. Some teams are great; others don't have basic controls. You typically have a bunch of different consultancies playing land and expand and selling expensive solutions that don't actually work.

As usual, the sweet spot is probably somewhere in the middle.

Regarding your first point about security, I see the opposite on a weekly basis. Devs, especially in startups, make secure technology decisions, but in a very narrow and entirely technical scope that essentially encompasses "their world". Once induced to see the larger picture either due to a compromised system, or table top exercises that include the rest of the business, they and leadership start to realize they've had a false sense of security.

Yeah, it's a problem on both sides of the fence.

Finding the balance is key.

If IT is too helpless to pick Zoom vs Ubeeconference vs whatever, what’s the point in having them?

Conversely, if you are a developer and you have time to be shopping for video conferencing solutions, what’s the point in having you?

“Conversely, if you are a developer and you have time to be shopping for video conferencing solutions, what’s the point in having you?”

I am often forced to spend a ton of time dealing with tools that don’t work. At my company a lot of meetings start with 10 minutes trying to make the phone conference work. So it’s good use of time to look for tools that work.

Same with Jira. IT bought it and promised to customize it but the last three years they haven’t done anything. so we are now setting it up ourselves. it’s not what we want to do but still the most efficient way to allow us to work.

I don’t know how buying decisions get made but I am pretty sure that user satisfaction is on the lower end of factors that get considered.

Every conferencing solution shares one trait: at least one person on a call of N+1 people will have trouble joining and getting everything to work.

I have been making the same "joke" for years on calls that everyone on the call should join me in quitting our jobs to create a teleconference solution that works. Hardyharhar.

(The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early)

If the host has at least tried the conference solution before the meeting it is usually ok for us, but that quickly become a specialized task that only one person care about, when s/he is away there is a high chance of wasted time.

I think the rule is that the other conferencing system always works better than the current system until you buy it. Then they all seem to fail :)

Right now we are using MS Teams which so far has been reliable. I am just waiting for the day when it becomes flaky too.

Teams actually works well for us too. My only complaint is about startup time and the consistent 2 or 3 second hangs that happen when I'm typing things sometimes.

So for the n+1: For us there are lots of problems. Bluetooth headsets seem to make it nondeterministic if and how sound works. Sharing and videoconf have sometimes extreme bandwidth problems. People aren’t getting into the conference sometimes.

The Teams UI on a Mac seems like a horrible abomination. Using it as a guest I have 45 sec startup time with a blank screen, no UI pieces visible other than a logo. I have lost the chat function and it is nowhere to be seen. The workspace is confusing. I could go on. I hope it is better on Windows, as on the Mac it is terrible.

Teams is just using Skype for teleconferencing under the hood I believe. Unfortunately it has been terrible quality for my distributed team in comparison to other options. Results definitely vary!

FWIW, our company used and loved Zoom for many years. We switched to Webex and it has been far more difficult to use.

I wouldn't discount the parent's post so quickly.

Do you know why they switched to Webex? I work at NIH and there is talk of moving from Webex to Zoom and I can't be more excited. Of course being the government it probably won't happen for another 2 years...

That’s really weird as WebEx is more costly and less featured in most cases. Zoom was designed by the same people, so I’m surprised it’s been a challenge for users.

My joke is that the unrealistic thing about Star Trek is not the faster than light travel or the matter transmitters it’s that their videoconferencing always works.

> (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early)

If everybody has to join early, then "early" is the new "on time". It's just sacrificing a different n minutes for setup issues.

Well, sure. My point is that showing up "on time" to an appointment and THEN making sure your tools work is backwards. No one says "I was on time except for needing to park, walk in, turn on the lights and sit down".

And I'm saying that if everybody is using unreliable tools, especially mandated ones, then it's not particularly backwards. E.g., during a consulting gig in Manhattan, it was not uncommon for a subway failure to cause the majority of people to be late for the first meeting of the day.

Similarly, I've seen a few companies where it's just assumed that a 9:00 meeting really starts at 9:05, so everybody has time to travel from their last meeting. I think the videoconference nonsense is effectively the same. It doesn't really matter if you designate 8:57-9:00 as your "make sure your tools work" time or 9:00-9:03. It just matters that everybody has the same expectation.

>At my company a lot of meetings start with 10 minutes trying to make the phone conference work.

You are most certainly not alone. In one Joshua Fluke's video, he accurately describes the feeling [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELrQyUIQkiY#t=7m55s

I was more referring to the "big corporation" example where you don't get to pick postgres. Or the general sentiment of "developers behave like children". They do, but because we encourage that behaviour.

The problem is that the devs are smart and stupid at the same time.

They're smart when discussing code complexity, callbacks, functions, APIs and the like. I've seen this time and again where many devs would get together to flesh out a chunk of a project and work together rapidly for the best way forward, along with nearly all edge cases. This is not simple or stupid in any sense of the words.

However they are also stupid when it comes to a larger view of what they work on. Perhaps myopic is a better term. I've seen devs write code expecting a database server has commodity access to the internet. I've seen devs include untested, unpatchable by WSUS software in generated system images. I've seen devs not give a second thought about logging, monitoring, error handling and more sysad level things, as it was outside of scope.

I trust devs in their domain, which is a narrow view of code. They've demonstrated they cannot be trusted with systems.

You said those are smart people. If they don't understand certain aspects that are relevant, why not try to teach them the importance of it (e.g.: here's what matters when we log, and why; if necessary, teach them how to monitor the system using logs so they see the importance firsthand). If they are truly smart and professional, they should be able and especially willing to learn about it.

But yeah, I think that as an industry we overemphasise (both in hiring and in our weird pseudo-meritocratic community) raw coding skills and underemphasise big picture thinking, communication, collaboration, etc.

I hear you, I work for a large manufacturing company as a lead engineer (household name in the UK) and this complete lack of agreement between teams on how to do things results in a colossal amount of churn/wastage between "new shiny" and "already working".

Lots of "Lets move X to Y" which never gets completed then someone addes "Z" and now you have 3 ways of doing basically everything.

Worse is our documentation (which is generally good) frequently documents X but not Y or Z because the person who decided on Y or Z didn't look.

It's mentally fatiguing, I feel like every choice on what to use comes with more trade-offs than I should have to consider for something so simple.

Video conferencing is a good example, We variously have Hangouts, Skype and others, teleconferencing equipment in one room is one thing, in another something else.

The only reliable way to throw video to a screen is a USB-C to HDMI cable I keep in my rucksack.

Feels like half my decisions are saying "No" to an engineer who wants to replace Foo with a very shiny but 99% identical and unknown Bar.

> The only reliable way to throw video to a screen is a USB-C to HDMI cable I keep in my rucksack.

That's quite progressive! Last I checked, many of our monitors only supported DVI and DP, and only some recently bought laptops have USB-C.

Developers who are issued laptops (not all are, juniors get desktops) get either 16” MacBook Pro’s or equivalent priced thinkpad.

Can’t complain about that though moving from Linux after two decades to OS X was a bit of a change.

I've worked with both sides of this argument and I find that "new shiny" is a perpetual problem. Anyone that proposes new shiny should be responsible of showing trade offs, integration feasibility, impact, etc.

I'm not against new technology but so many people want to adopt new technology X just for the sake of it being new technology X. I see this on developer teams I work with every day and it makes me want to gouge my eyes out sometimes, especially when I end up being forced to use their nonsensical choice of new technology X which makes my life harder.

Part of the problem I believe is that everyone is focusing on their own self-interest. Many developers for the most part don't care much about the business interests/growth. They're already looking for their next higher paying gig and want paid training in technology X at their current gig. Since many businesses provide little concern for long term talent retition, loyalty or investing in professional development that falls outside their business adopted technology preview, I completely understand the developers choosing themselves over the business. At the same time, going overboard shoots yourself in the foot because it strangles the business in the process.

There certainly needs to be a balance and a lot could be gained by giving developers freetime and resources for continued professional development.

I have a plan to put them off without the harsh "No" - require anyone proposing X be responsible for documenting X before it's put into 'production', if they want it that badly that they are willing to do that then I'd have more faith it's something useful and not "oooh the shiny" - worst case at least it's documented.

This rings so, so true.

At my very large company, in my particular department, any one trouble ticket may bounce between

(1) a Java ticketing app (2) a web/email ticketing system (3) a Jira issue, or (4) a Gitlab issue, or (5) a company-wide issue tracker

Other groups (e.g., customer service) have their own, completely separate systems besides the above.

Some development tasks are tracked with an issue tracker. Others are planned out in Confluence or Jira, per the whims of each team. We have literally 5 different chat "solutions," with various factions preferring each. Every day it seems someone brings online yet another script that sends out helpful emails. My count is around 16k since Jan 1.

The result of all of this is a sprawling, utterly insane flood of useless noise that everyone ignores.

> It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers.

Love the quote

It sounds like a few simple rules would help - you don't need complex procedures and forms, it can be as simple as "if you want to buy new software, ask the CIO or CTO, and in most cases they'll say yes/no on the spot".

I can't help but think this is a symptom of being awash with VC cash - I can't imagine this happening in a bootstrapped business.

I tend to agree. Bootstrapping, and small budgets, force discipline. Even without procedures. Practically infinite budgets tend to have the opposite effect. If senior management isn't forcing discipline things can get out of hand pretty quick.

> Bootstrapping, and small budgets, force discipline.

This is only true in the evolutionary sense -- Example: "parachuting forces people to be good at checking their gear."

Telling someone that they are going to jump out of a plane won't magically give them a skill like meticulousness.

It’s a skill like any other, and requires study and practice. There is a reason why half of pilot training is checklists and drilling procedures until they are permanently encoded into your muscle memory.

Right. But I often see people ask "how can I learn to X" and get advice like "Go do Y. It will force you to X". But jumping into to the situation unprepared is not how pilots learn skill X. They learn it through particular methods of study and practice.

Yeah, true. Frugality is a nice thing to have learned. And I agree, you don't learn it by bootstrapping your company. Rather your company will likely go bankrupt if you didn't learn it before.

If you have the basics already, so, bootstrapping forces you to build up that. No guarantees, so.

Note that the phrase "ask the CIO or CTO" hides an "obvious" skill: Concisely make plain the cost vs. value -- grounded in the CIO/CTO's understanding of value.

I think it's fair that if you want to spend company money, you need to justify it, especially so if it's on something that will be used by a whole team or across the whole company.

At a smaller company that values its devs, there hopefully shouldn't be too much ceremony around this, unless it's a particularly large spend.

But at larger companies, yes, you're likely going to have to know how to make your case in a more formal way, and get involved in company politics (ugh).

Agreed.

And there should be a good guide for junior devs on how to do that "justify it" step well in startups. Sounds like something that could piggyback off of https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

I hear you, but the only times I have seen the balance work is via a "committee" of DevLeads. Senior devs work with the trees everyday but are also able to see the woods. They are at the perfect position to make intelligent future proof decisions, and the second job of senior management is to ensure the DevLeads (or non tech equivalents) across the company are meeting talking discussing and deciding regularly and frequently (no a slack channel is not enough)

Where this totally falls down is where that committee becomes a full-time position, and the members stop doing actual dev work, becoming more and more out of touch with reality as time passes.

This was the case at an engineering company I worked with for several years.

The committee, or "enterprise architects" as they called themselves, became too far removed from the trenches, and the devs viewed them as sitting in an ivory tower and passing down ridiculous decrees.

They brought this view upon themselves, as they made it more or less impossible to even speak to them - almost all communication was through requests and forms uploaded to a sharepoint site!

They kept taking it further and further, until you even needed their permission to take a dependency on a 3rd party library for a LoB app. Such requests would sometimes take weeks to get a response.

We could never hold on to devs for long, in large part because they hated working under this bureaucratic nightmare.

The committee made all sorts of terrible decisions, always without consulting the devs and always with little justification, and these had a lasting impact for years to come.

Gods, it was horrible!

It's this "committee" job to make sure the organisation has the right tools without descending into anarchy

it's senior managements job to make sure the dev leads are working well

Basically this is senior / middle management in every company

you had senior management that have not realised the importance of software to their business - so they let a situation develop they would never allow in sales or accounts

I think this is pretty accurate, and you're absolutely correct that this wouldn't have happened in any other area of the business.

sharepoint site

IME, this right here should have seen the entire committee fired.

At the time, sharepoint was fairly new In Microsoft's portfolio (IIRC, they bought out another company), and it really was horrendous.

Thankfully it's a lot nicer these days - but I still wouldn't use it as a platform on which to build a web app (yes, we were forced, under great duress to do that - and the result was as awful as you'd expect).

We got the same catty comments from prospective customers about Uberconference.

Eventually we moved to webex, not because it's the best (it's not), not because it's the cheapest (it's not), but because many corporate customers seems to use it internally, and because it's what just about all corporate customers seem to expect.

This is fucking gold. Thank you.

The individuals in aggregate may be toddlers, but unfortunately the C-suite as individuals are often also toddlers, at least vis a vis their responsibilities. Tasked with providing IT infrastructure that works for the company, they seem to largely shirk their responsibility and choose IT infrastructure that best serves them, the needs of others be damned. CIOs will seemingly gladly choose something that provides a good UX for one central administrator even if the UX for hundreds or thousands of others is "the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes". Reports that the software gouges out everyone's eyes are roundly ignored.

I'm not sure to what degree this corporate disdain for quality of work environment is intentional or simply inability to grasp how other people may have different experiences using something, but I'm even more unsure how to solve it. What do we do when attempts to explain how shit sucks fall on deaf ears? Bring back pistol dueling?

Please recognize the fact that the argument you are making here is based on whataboutism and is dishonest trying to setup a us-versus-them situation and confuse the actual issue. Then you proceed to follow up with illlogical conclusions with absurdist claims ... pistol dueling has nothing to do with the ROI/TCO of an adopted SaaS.

The actual issue the parent argument is about managing diversity - and that you can never please everyone - and that isn't a pistols at dawn kind of situation.

Part of the problem here is that there is a balance to be struck with these sorts of things: Cost, User experience, Mange-ability, and time spent shopping around rather than just going with the industry-default or one with the best sales-team. Responsible decision-makers have to make trade-offs.

When you say

> Reports...are roundly ignored

That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem.

So what is the solution?

1. Understand the problem they're trying to solve. What are their real motives and pressures?

2. Understand where your needs align with theirs and where they diverge in reality.

3. Tell a compelling story of where your needs are in fact aligned.

3.1) Prepare Evidence

If your case is "This tool is causes literal permanent eye injuries to our staff", then there should be written reports of those injuries. If your case is "This software package has multiple missing-affordances which present operational risks to the business", then you should be able to take screen recordings of that.

3.2) Start with why

When turning evidence into a presentation, remember that people listen better when they know why they are listening. So start with: What is at stake?

3.3) Credible language

If your words say "the UX for hundreds or thousands of others is 'the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes'" but you can't actually back that up with the factual reality, you seem like you're exaggerating. If I think you are exaggerating, then I can't trust your words when I'm trying to understand magnitudes.

If I can't trust your words about magnitudes, then how do I give you a voice in making a well-balanced trade-off?

-------

Literally: (adverb)

1. In in a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated.

2. In in a way of speaking that is exaggerated for emotional effect.

You’re giving advice on how to be persuasive, and it’s rare I find comments as off-putting as yours.

I found it thoughtful and of much greater effort than your dismissal.

I'm curious why, if you have any insights.

The person you replied to pointed out where leaders were failing them. Rather than empathizing, you skipped to pointing out what they should be doing instead.

They made a hyperbolic comment (“literally shooting out knives”) and you’ve focused on dissecting it and accused them of using inaccurate language. Of course they’re just exaggerating when they said that even if people were losing eyes management wouldn’t care.

You switched to first person (“how can I know...”) representing the boss. This not-so-subtly puts you above the person you’re responding to.

Copy-pasting a definition comes off as pedantic.

Finally, no-one asked for an enumerated lecture on how they should be behaving.

> rather than empathizing, you skipped

hmmmm... I had tried to convey "hey, not being listened to really sucks" but now that I re-read "That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem." that's a pretty damn sterile way to express that. Also you're right that it should come first before the "here is this other perspective you should consider" bit.

> You switched to first person (“how can I know...”) representing the boss. This not-so-subtly puts you above the person you’re responding to.

hmmmm... really I hadn't considered that. My goal had been to suggest seeing things from the leader's perspective because they have a goal of changing leader's mind. But now that you point this out, I can see how this also creates a pompous framing.

Thank you, thats helpful to know to watch out for.

--------

> enumerated lecture

By this do you mean I was overly verbose? Or that having things in numbers comes off as...professorially pompous? Or both?

> no-one asked for ... how they should be behaving.

So I had interpreted the comment as a combination of an emotional vent but also a request for advice, particularly the "I'm unsure how to solve it. What do we do..."

Is this unreasonable?

---------

> They made a hyperbolic comment ("literally shooting knives")

> Copy-pasting a definition comes off as pedantic.

> Of course they’re just exaggerating

I... I guess I'm really struggling to cope with the loss of a word which is so dear to me and my ability to bridge gaps of understanding with my fellow human. Like, if the word "literally" no longer means.... _____

...I don't even know how to express the concept without a verbose and phrase like "a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated." that would overtax the patience of anyone. Take that away and...as far as I can see whole swaths of meaning about the world that I'd want to express are silenced. And I let the emotion of that get away with me.

The word is dying.

And if it affects me so deeply, I should not rage against the dying of its light but actually find a way to properly grieve it on its way.

I'm sympathetic to your concern about the use of the word "literally". It's sort of a special, meta word.

But there's a subtle difference here in how they used it. They said "even if the UX is ... 'the software literally shoots knives'".

They're speaking in hyperbole, not metaphor. So "literal" is somewhat appropriate. They're not directly saying that their boss wouldn't care about a bad UI. They're exaggeratedly saying that their boss wouldn't care about literal injury.

An exaggerated hypothetical as a way of saying "Here is what I'd predict about their behavior. Here is how much I trust them."

Hmmmm... I'll chew on that for quite a while...

Literally has not meant what you perceive it to mean, as a wholly intentional and really existing condition, since at least the 18th century. Your response seems to nitpick to the point of pedantry, rather than addressing the steel-manned version of the argument, or even necessarily arguing the argument itself.

Is it the report's job to bend over backwards to prepare a series of easily digestible info-graphics to convince the manager that the decisions they've made are bad? Or is it the manager's job to follow up on decisions they've made to see how they turn out, and to investigate to see if reports of eye-gouging are substantiated? In theory, the person whose eyeballs were affected by your decisions already have a litany of responsibilities that do not cease to exist when someone makes decisions that rock a company to it's very core. Maybe instead of shlepping the responsibility of identifying the consequences of their actions downstream, they should exhibit a little initiative and attempt to take a role in evaluating whether the decision they've made was the right one for the team.

Meta question: Why are we talking about people's eyeballs being literally stabbed out?

I had assumed that this was an expression of some (unknown) level of difficulty, and that if we could shift the discussion to describing that realities of that difficulty and its impacts on business operations and morale, we could get some insight.

But am I wrong?

This is the first time I've heard about "literally shooting knives and...gouging out eyes" in an IT discussion. Is this actually a thing that results from IT procurement in a literal sense? By "literal" I mean the sense that would refer to a piece of material entering the eye-goo of another human being and causing actual pain and hospitalization.

Does anyone else find it very difficult to understand situations when you are not sure at all how seriously to interpret someone? I'm aware I'm probably on the autistic spectrum...but since we're having a discussion about engineering or technology procurement, could I ask for a bit of specificity?

Is it odd to find the idea of literal eye-gouging to be out-of-place here? That it seems really extreme and like a very black-and-white way to talk about problems? Or am I just losing my mind?

Genuine question: Does my difficulty with understanding the role of literal eye-gouging in IT procurement and UX design signal that I'm becoming unhinged from reality?

The eye gouging on this case is a metaphor to stand in for "doing awful things that the software should never, ever do" which allowed them to be less specific about the exact nature of the problem that the software was having. This is because the specific problem with the software is not a detail of interest. Rather, you are supposed to take for granted that the software problem is very serious and being ignored by the superior. People will commonly use exaggerations and ridiculous metaphors to gloss over something as an unimportant detail so you, the reader, know that isn't the point they are trying to make.

I just rolled with it because it was GGP's example.

Literally means figuratively. But really vehemently figuratively. That is all.

So my understanding is that you're right to say that the manager has a responsibility to listen keenly for the impacts of their decisions. I'd say it is one of their primary responsibilities as part of their responsibility for the health of their team. The

But my understanding is that in general communication is a 2-way street: Both people in a relationship should be listening with the intent to understand the others' perspective and to watch for misunderstandings. Up and down a larger organization, I think this communication tends to be harder because

1) It is often indirect -- multiple hops from individual contributor to CxO.

2) The communication that can possibly happen grows with the size of the organization.

3) People work on things that are more and more delegated. So the day-to-day problems of an accounts admin are very different from the day-to-day problems of the CFO. So the gap of "understand each others' perspectives" becomes wider and harder to jump.

All this doesn't diminish a leaders' responsibility: it raises it. But it also makes it that much harder to execute if the signals from people in the org are hard to interpret.

> A series of easily-digestible info-graphics

Are nice, but "I've noticed a serious problem. Here is a 30 minute screen-capture of it." is faster to produce and send to a direct manager and then you can (ideally) collaborate on how to raise that to the wider business.

------------------

All this comes with the caveat that I'm an individual-contributor-level software engineer who has never managed a team for an endeavor more complex than a care-package-drive... and I might in fact be far enough on the autistic spectrum that I massively misunderstand how any of this works. (See other comment)

Sure, you're not wrong about any of this. But in GP, the commenter was essentially saying that if the CxO was not listening, it was because they didn't come with proof and business impact explicitly outlined in a convincing presentation, while I am arguing that in an emergency software-behaving-dangerously situation, it should not necessarily be the duty of the person bringing the claim to write a full report and presentation ahead of time.

I think being able to overcome principal-agent problem is one of the things that differentiate good C-suite from a bad one.

>> "the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes"

That would be PeopleSoft.

A former employer decided to use it to integrate/replace multiple different working business systems they had been running for at least a decade without issue. Part of that solution involved having 'project specialists' specially trained on the system so that they could run reports for project managers, presumably while also fetching them coffee (/s).

I looked at the UI once out of curiosity but very quickly shut down my browser as my eyes started bleeding.

> this corporate disdain for quality of work environment

You may find the term "managerialism" handy. It's the belief that managers and execs are the central story of a company, that everything must flow through them, especially key decisions. And of course, that as the special people, they deserve outsized rewards. It's the dominant philosophy of US business, and although it seems eternal to us, it was invented in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the MBA that became a vital qualifier to join the managerial class. And it is definitely a class system; note who flies in "business class", for example.

It took me a long time to be able to see it, but once I did I see it all over the place. It was sort of the same struggle when I learned functional programming: I had never really thought about the rest of programming, its philosophy and value system. I was soaking in it, so I didn't need to.

The book that got me going was "Confronting Managerialism", but I'm sure there's a fair bit more out there these days: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

I’ve seen another user on HN who grew up in the USSR call it “soviet capitalism”.

A friend of mine also recognized it in this 2015 article (see footnote 1): https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/obamacare

That's a good description. I'll also talk about "corporate feudalism", where you have the Duke of Engineering fighting with the Duke of Product, and the King/CEO must mediate the conflicts. The peasants, of course, are basically property of their various nobles.

But I really like "soviet capitalism", as it points at a key contradiction. Somehow, fans of capitalism, which maximizes surplus value by freeing individuals to make economically rational choices, rarely seem to notice that large corporations never make use of the mechanisms of capitalism, instead relying on central planning. And like the soviet era, corporate central planners often do things that are economically irrational, but useful to their careers and their quality of life.

Theory of the Firm is a huge topic in microeconomics.

At the end of the day, everything is a tree.

Nah. Humans, who evolved in dominance hierarchies, are very inclined to see everything as a tree.

I don't understand the contradiction you're getting at. The way capitalism works is that individuals are free to pursue their own interests. The way a corporation works is that they pay you a salary in order to pursue their interests. There's plenty of delegation happening in corporations, but ultimately there has to be some accountability controls since you are acting as an agent. What mechanism do you propose for leveraging individual incentives while still recognizing ownership of the corporation?

You really can't see the contradiction? I'll try again: Many fans of capitalism believe it superior to communism because free markets and high individual initiative produce better outcomes than central planning. However, they also believe in the awesomeness of corporations, which are generally run with central planning and no individual initiative.

Is that clearer?

>Many fans of capitalism believe it superior to communism because free markets and high individual initiative produce better outcomes than central planning.

You are incorrect, when you start getting into nuances. When you have the govt doing central planning, there is no way to get rid of them when they under perform. When people voluntarily form central planning organizational structures, they are eliminated by the free market if they under perform.

The difference between communism/capitalism is fundamentally of philosophy not of structure. In the former it's coerced co-operation (which almost always results in central planning) and the in the latter it is voluntary co-operation( there will be many organizational structures and some may have a central planning)

How old are you? (no I didn't make a mistake when I asked you that question)

>When you have the govt doing central planning, there is no way to get rid of them when they under perform.

All Democratic governments include a way to do exactly that - by definition. There's room for debate over how effective it actually is at removing underperformers compared to the free market, but saying it has no way to get rid of them is just untrue.

Is there? How often does the american federal government shrink? How would it shrink, if it turned out that it was too big?

In a democratic government, you're not electing the central planners. In the american government, you're not electing any of the millions of three-letter agencies that rule your life. You hire a president, and he may or may not do something, who knows.

At least a market has some contact with a ground truth of bankruptcy. If there were several competing EPA's competing for money on the basis of their efficacy, that might be interesting.

>All Democratic governments include a way to do exactly that - by definition. There's room for debate over how effective it actually is at removing underperformers compared to the free market, but saying it has no way to get rid of them is just untrue.

You are either young and naive, or an idiot. Sorry, name calling is the only way to call out ignorance. Things simply don't work the way you think it does. In theory 'democracy' promises you a lot of things, but you get very little. Most democracies for most part are sophisticated form of oligarchy where the masses are essentially fed what to think, by propaganda, 'debates' etc.

You've broken several the site guidelines in this thread. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here?

Crossing into making an argument personal is especially not ok, and we have had to ask you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21797575.

Dang, you may ban me if you wish. Sorry but my sense of what should be said appears to be fundamentally different from what is in the guidelines, or sensibilities of most people.

No clearer, you didn’t answer my question. How would you structure a corporation such that it isn’t centrally planned?

I'm not interested in answering your gotcha question. If you're really interested in alternative ways of organizing work, there's a vast literature on the topic. I'm not an expert, and I'm anyway not willing to play "bring me a rock" games.

My goal was to make a particular point about an unresolved conflict in managerialist ideology. If you're still having trouble understanding the point, feel free to ask specific questions, or to try restating the point in your own terms. But if you're mainly JAQing as an argumentative technique rather than seeking to understand, then I think we're done here.

I don't think it's a "gotcha question" to ask how ideological claims are tied to reality in practice. But lets keep it high-level as you desire.

First, you describe a "key contradiction" that the capitalist economy as a whole would operate differently from a corporation. But it's unnecessarily reductive to demand such consistency. Ideologically a corporation is closer to an individual actor than to the overarching economic system imposed by government. In practice corporations grow from a single individual to huge conglomerates on the merits of their market performance, not from threat of violence, monopoly on employment, or other political power.

Second, you claim, "large corporations never make use of the mechanisms of capitalism, instead relying on central planning," which is a bold claim requiring evidence. There is tons of autonomy granted across the levels of a corporation, and a long history of conglomerates and franchises that cover the gamut of such regimes. If all of these are "central planning" then you need to explain what the alternative would be, otherwise its just a hand-wavy no-true-scotsman claim that can't be meaningfully examined or discussed.

That’s a great term for it. It’s maddening to see it in the enterprise and just downright depressing when it creeps into a startup - like why do you think you’re here? To give enterprise vendors half your ebitda?

What do you call the paradigm in old-world militaries, where a lord would conscript their knights as officers during wartime; grant them "personal" budgets; and then each knight could take that budget and use it however they wished—by investing in technology, fortifications, or salaried subordinate hires, in any mix they liked, as long as it got the job done?

Yes, it's "feudalism", but it's a specific part of feudalism, that deserves to be called out separately—the idea that "everything must flow" through the org chart in a literal sense, with each node on the org-chart entirely encapsulating everything below it on the chart from the view of those above, such that the knight's liege-lord really doesn't know how they're getting the job done, just that they are or aren't; and has no actual capacity to micro-manage the HR decisions of the knight, with the lord's only controls on their knight being to change their budget, or to fire them.

In a way, it's less like what we're doing today in bigcorps, and more like what you get on the other end, when everyone is an individual, atomized contractor selling their services to everyone else. You can't see "through" a contractor-client relationship to the contractor's employees and/or subcontractors; you can only fire the contractor, or renegotiate their rate.

IMHO, while this paradigm might seem inefficient in ways, it still seems like a better "organizational architecture" than managerialism. Perhaps because, given the encapsulation, a punishment coming from your boss's boss can never "run downhill" to end up falling on you (though, nor can a reward); instead, each node on the org-chart can only rewrd/punish their direct report. At some point someone on the org-chart claims ultimate responsibility for getting the job done; and even if it came down to you, three nodes lower, failing to do it, it would still be their head, because it's their promise to their liege-lord.

Such a paradigm is inconvenient, in the sense that if your boss is fired, that means that you're out of a job—you were being paid, effectively, out of your boss's salary. But it's also convenient, in the sense that you can just apply for a job with another part of the company (really, apply to another superior to work for them), and there won't be any institutional bias (e.g. records of a "Performance Improvement Plan" against you because of a bad previous boss's poisonous office-politicking, only the personal biases of the boss's direct friends, who you can just avoid.)

Yeah there many large companies work somewhat in this way and one of the side effects is that there is a lot of competition for resources and projects and a lot of duplication. Small fiefdom get formed and battles between groups happen for control and the winner is not always based on merit. Those organization often end up starting to get dysfunctional.

In my view a larger version of that is the way the military is setup in the US. Lots of duplication. Every branch has planes and when they try to coordinate on large projects you get the F-22 project where every branch has demands that make the project take longer, more expensive and, with lots more compromises.

I think you mean the F-35 project.

But yeah, the military's a good example of taking the worst of both worlds there.

Yes indeed.

> It would still be their head, because it's their promise to their liege-lord.

In a way working at Google is like that. If your project doesn't have "impact" your manager isn't promoted and nobody in the team is.

And engineers are generally free to change team.

It does have some inconvenients and it doesn't remove politics.

There was a moment where the concept of "managerialism" was revealed to the public. It was embedded in the popular 1975 movie, Rollerball,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0&t=5m25s

I don't think you understand what you think you understand. For one thing, if you look around, managers do not all have MBAs. The manager I had for the longest was a previous analyst who didn't even have a college degree.

The difference between classes or tribes is their value system. The more you rationalize why your tribe is superior, the less chance you will ever be able to switch to another. So ask yourself if you really want to feel superior, or to prove yourself?

> managers do not all have MBAs.

Would you care to show me where you think I claimed 100% of managers have MBAs?

> ask yourself if you really want to feel superior, or to prove yourself?

Neither. There are more things, Horatio.

>Would you care to show me where you think I claimed 100% of managers have MBAs?

You wrote it was a "vital qualifier" to join the managerial class. You didn't 100% commit to saying it was necessary, but without that implication, I don't think you have really said anything.

Well if in your view I haven't really said anything, then I don't see much need for either of us to comment further.

Toddlers you say.. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a senior leadership weekly meeting where someone thinks it would be a good idea to assign a senior executive the task of grouping together everyone’s phone plans and deciding policy on who gets the company phone, who gets reimbursed and who is sol.

I wonder how much of this is a lack of communication from your CEO.

I've worked for companies that operated on very lean budgets. Everybody in the organisation knew what it was, it wasn't much fun but it was a clear policy.

There is no reason you can't do the same here, the objectives might be different but unless people up and down the organisation know what they are you can't expect anything other than anarchy.

This post starts by telling it's lauded idea of not single threading large purchasing decisions. It's simply irresponsible not to. Even the poster knows that, and that's why he thanks God that another C-level actually showed leadership. Honestly, reading the post, everything points to this guy being buddy boss. Bosses should create a positive work environment both at and away from the job. They should not be friends outside of work with their subordinates (yes, I know this is speculation about this guy, but the principal is true). I wish all these c-level folks with their making sure any shit they create always rolls right past them and onto someone else would just give their money to the person actually shoveling the shit... Because they recognize value.

> won’t let you use Postgres instead of MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers

I actively resist the notion that 'everyone but me is stupid' and propose a more realipolitik explanation: it's because power and budget. in manager heads, if you pick solution A I pick solution B, so that higher ups don't see the same line twice in services costs and get the idea they can obtain savings by merging the two functions, making one of us redundant.

yep yep didn't expect anything different from a techie community.

Sorry, but you are not a CIO, you just have a fancy meaningless title with no real correspondence to what it means. If the CFO decided to buy NetSuite without asking anyone, you care not CIO and he is acting as CEO because he can override you with no consequences. Just saying.

CFOs can't integrate new software themselves, but they can buy anything they want. Some of them let this go to their heads.

When I hear NetSuite ads, it's only while listening to the absolute dumbest sports talk shows. Apparently this marketing works...

That's not entirely accurate, if not to say that's completely inaccurate.

Contrary to what people might think, companies are not ran as military with the CEO being a commander-in-chief. In most of the companies, members of the C-suite have a certain or total autonomy to make any decisions that they want as long as it is somewhat within their domain. The conflicts between them are resolved via negotiation and horse trading. Just because the CIO does not like what the CFO is doing, does not mean that the CFO is wrong in making that decision, same as just because the CFO does not like what the CIO is doing does not mean that the CIO is wrong. When one CxO steps on feet of another CxO it is either resolved by reaching a new agreement going forward or resolution is punted into the future or one of the CxOs leaves.

I cannot tell how is each company organized, but I am working in a $250 billion company and I had the occasion a few years ago to find out in detail how this works when our CIO had to approve some IT purchase and there were some technical problems with the authorization system: our CFO does not have the authority to sign or approve any IT contract and nobody in the company will ever execute the payment. We are not organized as military, but each of us have spending limits (from $10,000 the lowest to a few hundred millions $ for CxO) and we cannot override that. Yes, we had people that bought stuff in their spending authority but not in their domain authority (that is much harder to limit in a system) and they were fired every time it happened.

Perhaps you should consider that your old, $250 billion company is going to be a bit more formal than a young, $50 million company.

If your company really does have a purchasing proces so rigorous that it will reject an "IT" contract signed by the CFO despite it being within their purchasing limit, then there's a reason for that. The reason typically being that in the past there was enough naughtiness by some CxO that they went to all the trouble of putting some heavy bondage into their purchasing rules.

Also, I would be willing to make a cash-money bet that CxOs shopping outside their domain authority don't get immediately fired for that. Even at your company.

Yes, you are right, they are not immediately fired; they "retire" immediately or leave the company in the next few months. In the past month we just "retired" a few directors and another one is "just leaving" in 3 months, until then his spending limit is revoked and he is just onboarding the replacement.

If C<X>O titles are meaningless if they don't confer absolute authority over <X> then they are pretty much all meaningless, so what's your point?

If this line of argument is true, then a quick glance at r/talesfromtechsupport makes me think there's no such thing as a CIO.

he said it’s a 50 person company. even if he had the authority you mention he would not be a “CIO”

Do you mind sharing the name of your startup?

Lol. I doubt they'd be careless enough to do that. As soon as they do, you can then put names to all the people mentioned. Which is obviously not their intention otherwise they'd have done so.

If it were that easy you could probably just find several cyber security startups and work backwards to find out which one he’s talking about.

Your CFO got sold ... twice. Concur and NetSuite are both enterprise level software that a company with 50 FTEs does not need.

NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results. I dealt with a very similar situation, in which a project manager("VP") talked our owner into using NS, but it was over $100k/year and commitments were 2 years per seat at something like $5k. He ALSO wanted to do the roll out himself. 6 months later, it was still not functional.

I got pulled onto the team to help. We made _some_ progress and I hired and managed 4 remote programmers to write all the plugins and customizations we would need to make it work with our model (multi-channel e-commerce, multiple warehouses/locations). It was a nightmare all-around and completely unnecessary. PM/VP left the company because he couldn't do the job and we were stuck with a half-assed implementation at that point.

It's been around 4 years since the first day, I am no longer with that company, and I am sure they are still struggling with NS and employing multiple developers to keep things going. Good for the devs, bad for biz. I am willing to bet it's never returned a single dollar on the investment and cost them far more than they wanted to spend. If you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel at this point, cut your loses, and don't get another "solution-in-a-box".

Hah this story sounded familiar. Makes sense.

Weirdly, almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat next to somebody at a wedding who had an almost-identical story about cleaning up after an SAP rollout, but all of the numbers had an extra zero or two. It amazes me that what the SaaS shift appears to have achieved is that now much smaller companies can get stuck in the same "solve everything" money pit.

But I guess the fundamental problem hasn't changed: executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work. With no regard for actual operational efficiency, and no need to hold themselves to the ROI standards they'd demand of others.

> executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work

Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise.

As with most things, the problem is complicated, deeply human, and answers lie somewhere in the middle.

I agree with this wholly. I very much doubt that many people are building tools in bad faith to consume money. It’s just that in the end, “solve everything” means implementing 10:1 weird hacks for edge cases vs actual features that companies all have in common.

That works both ways. 70% of features are common with other businesses, but the feature set is pretty diverse. My experience is that internal folk with a good understanding of the business hit 90-95% of the requirements without implementing the 200% of non-relevant broader industry requirements. YMMV.

The off the shelf solutions are designed to fit everyone, while bespoke solutions are designed just for you. A lot of the complexity in off the shelf software is that generality that might never be needed.

So true but very rarely expressed.

And often the features you need are much easier to implement than you might have expected and, due to the generalisation complexity, hacking on the off-the-shelf product often much more difficult.

20+ years ago, same for Seibel

Maybe we'd all do better de-digitizing our processes. Return to paper.

I've been struggling to articulate a thesis, for way too long. But here it goes.

Complexity catastrophe occurs when cost of change outweighs benefit. Or simply can't be done in time to make a difference.

Whereas databasization makes processes inflexible, humans are relatively more flexible. Like being able to make notes on forms, or quickly modify a form and make more copies to use.

I'm heavily influenced by process and methodology ideas. Deming, Drucker, TPS, etc.

As well as their critics. Postman, Norman, etc, and most recently David Graeber.

Graeber's notions about bullshit jobs and bureaucracy have articulated many of my misgivings as well as made me feel stupid for my hubris.

Both database and paper mediated systems have pros and cons. In defense of younger self, we were not fully aware of the costs and limitations of databases, so couldn't properly weigh the options. Worse, my entire career, I tried to mitigate, engineer workarounds to databases, not willing to accept the problems are intrinsic and not just artifacts of suboptimal implementations. Basically, clap louder and Tinkerbell will fly. Embarrassing.

My notion of "complexity catastrophe" comes from Design Rules: The Power of Modularity.

I may have just coined "databasization". I've long accepted the difference between digitization and automation. Moving processes from paper to computer mediated vs removing judgement (aka process reengineering). But have never found a succinct way to explain it. Maybe "databasizition" makes the distinction more clear.

Thanks for listening.

One of the first things I got told about databases is that you may build the most beautiful database schema for the domain, but it will never be able to be complete.

For the applications that I designed so far, that meant that I always made room for intentional loopholes like free-form comments or ways to override hardcoded processes. It is not 100% perfect and foolproof, but it made using these applications a lot less painful in practice.

A wholesale return to paper is like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. It is really about how rigid a process can become without becoming a barrier or burden.

Superior strategies like this are like hidden lore. Why is that? I'm certain there are dozens or hundreds of these hard won lessons.

I had to rediscover the "INSERT only, no UPDATEs" trick on my own. Changed from separate truth and historical tables to a single table which is groomed over time. Major simplification. A few extra benefits: like scaling, testing and auditing.

And my peers absolutely lost their minds. A senior VP rolled back my architecture the moment he could. (We were acquihired, so this meant major upheaval of systems which had be in use for over 3 years.) My solution was just too weird looking, too unorthodox.

So while there's lots of things we can do to mitigate databasization and buy ourselves some head room, we don't.

Square peg, round hole?

My radical (unoriginal) thought is the problem is the people, not the tools.

Sorry, this is example of my muddled thinking. Here's another shot:

Real world is messy, evolving. Schemas and programming languages encourage rigidity, but can be more flexible. So while we can design and use adaptable systems, we don't.

An additional theory I have is that the people drawn to our type of work have rigid views and strive to make the world more ordered, through their systems, rather than accommodate the chaos. Aspirationally. Not in truth. Because I regard most of our efforts to be rather chaotic.

"INSERT only, no UPDATEs" - sounds like event sourcing?

Or an append only log. Either way, not things unheard of in software engineering.

Obvious in hind sight.

Fowler's Event Sourcing [2005] https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

Published after I stumbled onto my solution.

I really like the idea of intentional loopholes. It is a great way ton conceptualize what I have been doing for a long time. In my opinion there is a certain feeling of satisfcation when feeling like the domain is modeled completely. Uncertainty or loopholes leave an itch to scratch. That's why people insist on modelling addresses. Adresses which are a fundamentally easy thing, should be easy to model. Like what, a house is on a street, has a number a city a state and a postcode. All of them are obviously required. And then you get into actual addresses. People who live in a village without a street. Some countries have no states. Some names can be extremely long. For example my condo adresss is 62 characters alone. I think the only thing you can rely on for addresses is postcode, city and the rest is free form. But that feels so unsatisfactory.

Addresses are hard. Off the top of my head: I live in Germany. Germany has states, but they are not part of postal addresses. A lot of US sites keep insisting on entering a state wven though that is wrong. There are tiny villages without street names. The name of the village substitutes for the street name. Maybe there are single house settlements with house numbers - I am not sure.

And then there is Mannheim, a city with no street names. This was originally a planned city where the city center has rectangular blocks numbered in a letter-number scheme. So there is e.g. a block L5. This refers to one side of the 4 adjacent streets. The other side of these streets is addreseed with L3, L5, etc... what his means is that you have addresss like O7 6 - a single letter and two numbers in a row. I bet that a lot if input validators for addresses trip over something like that.

Your points are irrelevant because it's simply impossible to use paper anymore for any but the smallest local businesses. Paper is too slow. Customers and employees would quickly leave.

Complexity catastrophes must be suffered because paper mediated processes are impractical?

Complexity catastrophes are rare and seldom actually catastrophic. It's easier to deal with occasional catastrophes than with the delays and inconveniences imposed by paper processes.

I cited definition of complexity catastrophe for purposes of my thesis.

What's your definition?

you also didn’t list any pros or cons of either. from my perspective, which is weekly travel for a very large company, moving back to paper is a nightmare. what do i do with my daily receipts? how do i submit this and hope to get reimbursed this year? having to manage this all on paper seems excruciatingly inefficiency

TLDR: Maybe I'm just railing against bureaucracy. I share my techno perfect dream at the end.

"you also didn’t list any pros or cons of either."

Thank you. You're right; I should do that. Long overdue.

Alas, I don't know how to do that.

The best I can do, at this time, is list examples of digital, paper, and hybrids which succeeded and failed. Try to divine RCAs. Then see if there are patterns.

I do have some initial guesses about best use of paper.

1- Organizational boundaries.

Like mediating communication between entities. (It slays me that scripts and referrals are done by fax, which might as well be black boxes, because the communication can fail silently.)

2- Legal stuff.

IDs, cash, voting (ballots), titles (property).

3- Short lived communication (semaphores), coordination, collaboration.

Lo-fi tools for brain storming, designing. Visible tools, like resource planning white boards.

"what do i do with my daily receipts?"

You say that like it's obvious. Of course we should design (engineer) away data entry.

Yet SAP Concur is still a thing, with wide adoption.

JIRA, ServiceNow, PagerDuty are crimes against humanity. Bending the work towards computers, instead of empowering humans.

I've gotten so much shit (from the larger orgs) the times I've moved my teams from heavy weight, labor intensive, error prone tools to lightweight lo-fi tools.

One stupid example: For weekly triage, we'd just print the bug list, and everyone (everyone) could vote, then cc copies of the list as needed. Voila, instant priorities.

The majority of push back is the style documented by Neil Postman's Technopoly. Some people can't wrap their heads around not using computers for everything. It's like the debate between ontologies and folksonomies. People who can't accept ambiguity vs people who can accept "good enough". (Just one over simplification of the psychology. I did pre-caveat by admitting my thinking is muddy.)

###

I've long dreamed of a technical solution.

Some kind of hybrid of HyperCard & wikis backed by version control.

New instances of a CRUD form (both UI and backing data) would just be cloned, a la prototype based classes. Every instance can be customized, a la live editing. Imprint both schemas and forms with a version token, so the system can support multiple variations, so that orgs and evolve processes incrementally (instead of outright cut-overs).

I recently made some progress on bridging the gap between persistence and UIs. I'm trying to reorient my life to resume work.

It’s vendor lock-in pure and simple. In my org, I make sure there is data portability. Even if we have to write the plumbing between services, we understand and own the data and an interface to access it is available.

This argument applies to open and close sourced software alike (ever try to migrate from MantisBT to Jira?)

Some years ago, shortly before my manager asked me to join the company he was working for, they embarked on a mission to find an implementation partner to get their Salesforce system off th ground into a new level. So the business owners and him discussing how they'll pick the right consultancy. My manager says: we'll take those who will tell us that we talk nonsense instead of nodding head after every single word we say. I then joined the company and ended up in the meeting,where initial plans were discussed. My manager says: we want x,y,z,etc. The consultant says: OK, let's be realistic first: let's learn how to walk and then we may discuss whether you should be launching rockets to space. All these SAP, NetSuite and other corporate software get bad name because of poor implementations and not because the software itself is bad.

I dunno, every time I interact with anything SAP or Oracle I am reminded of the fact that the software itself is bad.

Unsurprisingly this is a similar story from our customers who switch away from us, and then come crawling back due to the implementation nightmare from NetSuite/SAP. Usually it's a high level executive who wants the name recognition and the "no one got fired for picking X" mindset.

Where do you work?

A small family-run company building an ERP solution for wholesale distributors. (www.mastersystem.com)

This reminds me of something someone told me about "build vs. buy" for SAP. When you build, you can solve for your business model. When you buy, you have to fit your business model to what you buy.

The insinuation was that trying to buy and customize SAP to your business was a fools errand.

On the other hand, you are now beholden to the treadmill of your business' ever-changing demands as their processes change. You are devoting engineering resources (not cheap) to products which do not directly make money. For a group that is already typically organized as a cost center, this is not a great look.

>NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results.

IMHO, this describes any Oracle product. Usually what happens is a great little enterprise software company that gets a lot of happy customers gets bought by Oracle and then they start sucking the money out of everyone through nickel and dimeing on absolutely everything and make moving off the platform impossible and integrating with it difficult.

We're in similar situations with a lot of our software vendors, NetSuite included. We've had maybe one vendor with which I've at least been reasonably happy (and, naturally, we're halfway through replacing that vendor with a different vendor that's significantly worse, because reasons). Same deal with nearly all my previous companies.

I guess it's normal for enterprise software vendors to be absolute trash.

Thank you v much for sharing this first-hand perspective. V helpful.

As many people as possible should post their salary on slack.

>A few month later, sales went out and bought 10 mf’ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone because some client hadn’t heard of UC and asked if it was the budget solution.

They have a point, the more things you need a client to do out of the ordinary the more friction you will get selling them. New UI for them to figure out, new permissions, etc. Depending on your business model as a startup that can be a bad thing.

It seems like you try to enforce a rigid structure but don't provide a quick process to changing or appending to that structure. So intelligent people work around your structure and you have no idea. Seen it at many companies. Generally tied to an inability or in-desire to delegate decision making. Which is different than letting people make decisions, rather it involves creating a structure under which they can make decisions.

Employees have the most view into what would make their job more efficient or engaging. You want them to think of optimizations and you want them to feel engaged enough to try and improve the business. If you don't listen then they will work around you rather than with you. Or just find another job.

Employees want something? Delegate to them the responsibility of building a business case and give them a structure on what that needs to look like. Then they can present it and the team can discuss. Make sure to say yes sometimes even if you think it's sub-optimal since otherwise they'll feel it's a pointless process.

> Employees have the most view into what would make their job more efficient or engaging.

Employees in aggregate know the true answers to those things. Employees individually sometimes do, but often do not. For example, if you have a stone-aged development process on an ancient revision of an unsupported language, and you poll your employees, they'll all want change. They'll all want ... different changes/processes/pet programming languages, too.

Sure but when the decision is left to employees, they will organically choose solutions that makes the most sense for them rather than what makes sense only to an individual. Treat the employees as autonomous responsible individuals; give them the freedom on how to best solve their problem and they will solve it.

Seen another way, as a manager who is not involved in the day to day you don’t deal with the same problems that they do. Quite presumptive of you to think that you know what will solve their problems.

Sure but then you create a process for the change and delegate the information gathering and decision aggregation to people. Then implement whatever that process comes back with as the result.

Or in other words, rather than doing all the cost-benefit analysis yourself you teach other people to do it. That way in the future they can just do it and you can review.

edit: It's the difference between seeing your employees as toddlers versus intelligent individuals no different from yourself.

Damn I hope I never work under someone who considers their employees to be toddlers.

Given a large enough sandbox this could be a great working environment. I once worked in an R&D department to produce physically shipped (diskette/cd-rom) software. It was the best of times. Go to conferences, learn shiny tech, make up new toys, sell them as products. We even had annual toy budgets for anything no-questions-asked as well as constant upgrades to the latest hardware running obscure operating systems. Unfortunately the company run too well, eventually shrinking to collecting license and maintenance support fees.

One funny story was how whenever we'd be burning the midnight oil to produce the final release, we'd declare it the golden master and hand it over to our shipping department to distribute to our customers. One time I had to make a recall due to a fatal bug. The masters were handed back to me with a smile and when I asked, she said that after the last few recalls of golden masters, she always let them sit on a shelf for a week before actually shipping anything.

OT, but as the founder of a microISV selling B2B, I'd love to hear something about how you do sales and marketing? It's unquestionably our biggest pain point.

get out ASAP. you are mismanaged and doomed

> It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.

Oh man, respect for putting up with and handling all of that. Those choices don't sound "individually smart" either though... There seems to be a lot of pretty straightforward Dunning-Kruger going on.

Yeah, some of this stuff is going to happen and it's a hassle dealing with it. However, and this may not have been the case with you but has happened where I work: If no one is satisfied with the tools they use then maybe the selection process isn't properly taking user needs into account. You, for example, may find Zoom's meeting ID/participant ID system onerous, but if the bulk of your users need or want something else, there's a problem: Smooth comunication with potential clients through a tool they're comfortable with is rather important. Personally, I can't stand the parade of different conference tools that require their own browser plugins or installed clients or single-use download client etc.

It would be beyond weird for an IT department to have any say whatsoever in whether a development team used Postgres or Mariadb.

Not if the IT department is responsible for all vendor relationships and a support vendor exists.

This is not a operating mode I’d encourage but I’ve encountered it in companies in the past.

Exactly, it's always MS SQL Server no questions asked :)

After all it's the "approved" solution around here.

Sounds like your CFO (also CTO?) is performing two huge roles. If he keeps focusing on managing the tech your finances are probably not in good hands (since he/she is probably doing neither job optimally).

It sounds like a toxic mess.

Viewing your underlings as toddlers probably isn't helping matters much. Everyone has very specific needs. They are interested in meeting their needs and need to make local decisions that look dumb from high level. Aka greedy choices.

Its a bit academic, but "Cognitive Structure of Emotions", Ortony might help you break down some of the people issues in your org.

There is a balance. How do you give lower parts of your organization autonomy to make local decisions and at the same time make choices that are sane from a higher level. 40-50 people is typically a tipping point for human social structure. This is where tribal systems break down and require a strong leader and more well defined roles.

> It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers.

Or maybe you are biased to go against change because it just annoys you.

Without going into too much detail I can say that I've got very similar situation at work.It looks like THAT next piece of software will solve it all for everybody. The number of various apps we've got is absurd. In your case,the most interesting part is how CFO manages to get to the point where he's responsible for getting NetSuite...

Never heard of Uberconference. Everyone has Zoom though, so that's sort of the default choice for that sort of thing - to the point where it's becoming a verb. And the product is pretty good.

> no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy

You made my day. Quote of the year so far!

> It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers.

That's a great line, and it's only funny because it's true.

That’s a lot of dysfunction for such a small company and you don’t seem too solution-oriented. Why would a 50 person company even have a CIO?

Gosh... no one in their right mind should ever select Concur for reimbursement. I could understand a big company talking heads getting lured in because their secretaries would be suffering through Concur crapware, not them. For startups, I would have expected the decision-makers to give a through hands-on treatment before enforcing it on everyone.

Seriously, you shouldn't be making technical choices for professional developers as CIO unless you are writing code as one of them. If you think they are like toddlers, your hiring is already busted. More seriously, CIO is a pointless title no one really knows why it exists. Even more seriously, startup shouldn't be having "IT department". If you do, you are already Walmart at that point, not Amazon.

I was a sysadmin, consultant before going EE/CS and AWS consultant after that for Fortune 200. AWS is extremely overpriced for running a stable amount of resources. For a lab, it's trivial to buy some used, power-efficient enterprise servers to run in a second-tier co-lo, install Xen or KVM on bare metal managed by an IaaS solution similar to CloudStack. On top of that, a PaaS like CloudFoundry or CFCR.

I cringe whenever I heard a CIO say, "It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers." While I do agree that there are tradeoffs between centralization vs decentralization, not sure that's the best way to frame the tension. Maybe rather than thinking inside the constraints, there are ways to find infrastructure/architecture to relieve them?

Going to leave these to consider: (guess from which book)

1 - Processes are supposed to protect people from Distractions and help them deliver their core objectives.

2 - IT is not merely a department, it is pervasive like electricity.

3 - In order to survive, the business and IT can’t make decisions exclusive of each other.

(IT = centralized function; "business" = functions being supported, including devs)

I applaud you for sharing your story. With the rise of shadow IT, not enough of respect is given to CIOs and IT teams for making sure the entire company’s infrastructure doesn’t implode on its own. The main reason why we have so many data silos is because everyone is going out and buying software on their own specific to their needs without batting an eyelid to the enterprise. Vendors love the fact that they can circumvent IT just to get their solutions going and get your started without ever mentioning that a new data island is being created and work will be needed to bring it all back in-house.

Aside: can I ask for some advice on software requirements? We’re designing our solution to meet IT requirements and want to get under the skin of CIO concerns.

I wonder how that attitude comes across to the people you work with. They may be avoiding your processes exactly because you view them as toddlers.

I love that toddler bit. Throw a lot of smart people together and you generally just get some sort of chaos. This isn't just tools, it's the software architecture, libraries etc. The problem is if you go ahead and tell the smart people what to do, they get annoyed, if you don't tell them what to do, they go and play with the shiny toys. If anyone has solved this problem I'd like to know! ;)

> Of course, he later unilaterally selected NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!)

My condolences.

Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt.

For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used by other small startups.

I don't think it adds up to that much, compared to the cost of developers. Where I live in Eastern Europe, a single mid-level developer would cost at least $5k/mo once you take into account taxes, office space and benefits. In SV I guess you are talking well over $20k/mo. $20k/mo is a lot of software.

non-technical staff need access to tools like Notion, Slack and Hubspot, the bills add up quickly

They do, but it only matters if you're working in a region with very low wages or you have a lot of people that only work for a few hours.

I see those tools mostly like a fast computer, good internet, drinks and snacks etc. They really aren't that expensive compared to the employee but they will help the employee be much more effective.

I see this argument get trotted out a lot. Compared to <dev salary cost>, adding service x,y and z percentage wise is just a small increment.

The problem that gets easily overlooked is that compared to the costs being made, the profit in many cases is also just a small percentage of the revenue, and the small % increment in costs can mean a large % decrement of profits. You should always compare incremental cost of revenue to the margin, not to the base cost.

Now if you are running a profitable SaaS business with 80% margins, a 4% increase in spend might not mean the end of the world even if it was wasted on spurious licenses or other frills, but if you are a healthy service business operating on 12% margins then that 4% increase will reduce your profits by a massive 33%.

This doesn't mean that you have to make do with the bare minimum and skimp on decent hardware or development environments, but it also means the marginal productivity/retention/quality increases must in the end be worth it in terms of increased aggregate profits, and not be justified as 'you already pay me 5K a month, so whats another 250 for ...

Sure, buying as an end in itself isn't wise. If the tools aren't improving the metrics, they are too expensive and it doesn't matter if it's $10 or $1 per month.

But if they do improve the metrics, you'll typically get more done, which will translate to more revenue. Software & tools tends to be somewhere between 0.5 and 3% of total employee cost in my experience, but of course it's not priced per market, so that would be significantly higher with the same tools in an area with lower salaries, less non-wage labor costs etc.

Yes, unless the alternative to the saas is spending dev time to build/customize/host something; then the comparison makes sense.

What does notion do?

I've seen businesses run on Microsoft tools and Engineering tools exclusively.

To be fair, a lot of businesses used to run on typewriters and a really big ledger.

A lot of these services get quite expensive very quickly once you go over the free threshold. The free plans are just a loss leader to encourage vendor lock-in.

For example, I used to use the MixPanel free plan in a project and went over the limit and suddenly the plan cost around a thousand dollars per year.

Doesn't sound like a lot of money for a business.

It's nothing for a VC-funded or mid-to-large company; it's significant money for a self-funded small business just for enhanced tracking in most countries. Really depends on what kind of business we are talking about.

But the question then is whether you need to do that level of tracking at all. Sometimes of course the answer is yes (“we’re small now and hyperattention to the user demographics will tell us which feature from the list we should implement next”). But often it’s just “well let’s see who’s using our product” without a lot of analysis. Wasted money and unnecessary intrusion into the users’ affairs.

For a bootstrapped business who is talking about their ~$250/month outgoings it is. The problem is that the expenditure doesn't grow linearly with growth so there will be a window of growth where the company starts achieving "diseconomies of scale". This may or may not be factored into their business plan.

I had this thought for a while too. A VC invests then has you subscribe to his other companies. A circle jerk basically.

I suspect the bubble is going to burst at some point. Not really an expert in any of this, but it seems conventional wisdom is "invest in 10 startups, see one succeed", whereas by now I'm led to believe that the chance of success is much lower than 1 in 10 given the often times ridiculous companies that are being invested into. But happy to be proven wrong.

Welcome to the Mass of the Church of Decentralization. Here is your baptismal wallet address.

If you think that's a ponzi scheme, allow me to introduce you to the world of Silicon Valley commercial real estate.

It's a valley thing, and then maybe smaller services run by digital nomads. Most of the startups around the world are trying to solve real local problems by emulating successful ones in the USA or China.

I used to think this every time I downloaded a free mobile game. Probably 90%+ of ads in mobile games were for other free mobile games that presumably also have the same ad-supported model and the same sort of advertisers. It feels like there's a few games making heaps from IAPs and everyone else is just advertising in a pyramid toward them while also using IAPs in a way that makes their own game basically unplayable.

There are different genres, or tiers (casual, hyper casual, midcore) that vary greatly in their economic schemes. Casual and hyper casual especially have low CPIs but low LTVs as well, and ads are a very important income source for them. Midcore and up have CTI that is much higher (can be up to $10 or even higher), and of course, they have very small % of paying users as well, but they make it up in ARPPU and especially whales, and almost don't depend on ad income (but since most of their audience doesn't pay at all, they still show ads, of course).

That's why you want to run pyramids, not play them.

In service fee markets, the brokers walk away with bags of cash.

Similarly, web comic ads seem to consist entirely of ads for other web comics.

Isn't this just standard targeted advertising? The back page of the book has ads for other books! The protein bar sets up a sample-stand in front of the health-food store! Etc etc.

You gotta advertise to get traction, and the best place to do that is where your users already are..

This one isn't so bad. You like web comics, you probably would like other web comics.

What is boneheaded is advertising shovels to me because I was tracked while buying another shovel online. I already have my damn shovel for the next 50 years I do not care anymore at all about shovels. Now if I were served a wheelbarrow ad...

PG talks about noticing the same phenomenon - when at Yahoo during the dotcom bubble - in the beginning of this article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html

Thanks for linking that, interesting read and funny to see my showerthought having some merit.

Good essay otherwise, but you can tell this was written a while ago:

Google has over 82 million unique users a month and annual revenues of about three billion dollars. And yet have you ever seen a Google ad? Something is going on here.

Like the Berlin startup selling startup branded merchandise to other Berlin based startups?

Might very well be the case.

This is part of the reason why I like working in a B2C company. B2C has it's own set of problems, but we aren't dependent on a small group of unprofitable companies.

One thing that's been really interesting is seeing how many SaaS tech companies products just don't work for us at all, for example Intercom.

Intercom is a great product, but all of their pricing is centered around how many people use your site. If you have a high-touch sales and support pipeline where a customer is worth $$,$$$s, Intercom's pricing makes sense. If you have hundreds of thousands of customers worth $$s, that's still a workable business, but Intercom's pricing is a complete non-starter.

They aren't the only one. I do wonder if they truly understand how much they are locking themselves out of some markets. Another example was the quote we got from Grafana Cloud that was more than our AWS bill.

You may be correct, but I'm just throwing out the idea that perhaps, the needs of these two different kinds of companies are so different that it is a good idea to specialize in one or the other, else you become mediocre at serving either one?

But the flaw in my logic is that the one, sometimes evolves into the other.

No this is a very good point, being B2B serving B2B means likely lower traffic and different concerns to being a B2B serving B2C companies.

My counterpoint would be that the B2B companies don't always seem to recognise this, but it's not to say they haven't internally decided not to pursue that market. I think it's a shame if they have, it's a very large market!

Huh? AFAIK I'm getting billed by the (employee) seat for Intercom, irrespective of the number of customers. It's been great.

Their pricing page is pretty confusing, I'll be disappointed if I hit some sort of hidden price cliff.

This has all happened before. This will all happen again. http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Also, you could add Amazon AWS to the list of businesses that look profitable now but are making their money off a lot of companies that are not profitable and never will be.

There is absolutely a startup support industry. I am wary of using tools that seem to cater to startups only or that are interops between other startups, because I see the whole industry as brittle. Robust in aggregate, but individual services come and go daily.

I want longevity in my tooling, and I personally feel it's irresponsible to put your product into the hands of thirty companies who are all on the same growth or die cycle.

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup:

1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype

2. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder

3. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment

4. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account has been more than enough

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month), SalesQL ($29 / month), Hubspot ($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they don't and if not, then they aren't worth the monthly subscription

6. Figma ($24 / month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven't seen instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or paper, then get rid of it

sentry does have a free level which works out decently for small/medium volumes, but yeah, self-hosting might be cheaper.

7. Github ($7 / month) — has unlimited private repos for a while now up to 3 collaborators.

> 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype

Also, Email is federated, and your communications are not under the control of a single company. Email is easier to archive as well.

Looks like their product is built specifically for Slack.

4. Cloudflare - maybe better safe than sorry since you need Pro for the WAF.

The $20/mo upgrade has more than that: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features

You need to pay it just for Cloudflare SSL to work in all browsers which is pretty necessary if you use that feature at all. But the plan has various other goodies like more page rules, the "Polish" image compression, and rate limit rules.

SSL status isn't changed with the pro plan. If you want non-SNI clients to be able to visit your site, you need the Business plan which assigns IPs to your website that serve your SSL even without SNI present, but this is usually unnecessary as the non-SNI client base gets smaller every year. All of the major browsers support modern TLS and SNI so the free plan will work as long as you don't need to support users running XP or odd mobile browsers on 5+ year old Android.

I disagree.

Slack is so much more than a discussion app.

With integrations you can monitor your whole app in one place:

- sales

- bizdev

- ops

- deployment

- support

Same goes for Notion.

We pay $16 but it is an awesome bang for the buck:

- crm

- collaborating blog draft

- project management

- finance

- knowledge base

And again, in one place.

Or you can set up email notifications and do the exact same thing in any mail client, like people have been doing for ages.

But that's not cool any more I guess.

I think you underestimate how pervasive and usable Slack is over email.

Email is still fine and necessary but is mostly for long form asynchronous communication. Organizing email inboxes is a pain. Spam is a pain.

Slack is pre-organized and automatically integrated with a dozen other tools. It’s the beating heart of a distributed organization.

nothing to do with "cool". I could never go back to email after using slack-like software. It's so much more efficient.

That is debatable. For sending IMs, sure. For a lot of other stuff it's pretty noisy and even with search is still less organisable than email.

It's debatable which is why the snark of "guess email isn't cool anymore :(" is such tired commentary, suggesting everyone is just an idiot lemming for not having email enlightenment.

I agree with your point in principle, and it's my natural tendency to optimize out dependencies on recurring charges for services. But I actually think this perspective is wrong, or more precisely, focusing on this type of optimization will make your business less likely to succeed.

The problem is ROI, $227 a month adds up to $2724 a year, which, assuming you're in the US (or similar cost of living area), is just such a small sum of money, relative to even just living expenses, that even spending time thinking about it, let alone actually using less efficient solutions, is going to negatively impact your business's chances of success.

I say this as someone who is really drawn to optimizing out these expenses. So I don't want it to be true, but I truly believe focusing on these types of costs lowers my businesses chances of success.

Perhaps. But it creates a false and unsustainable culture. If you're going to bootstrap then do so. Afterall, scarcity is the mother of innovation.

Inexpensive or not, unnecessary is still unnecessary. What's next, $3k standing desks?

Cost is the not the only issue. My first impression was, do you really need all that. And is it making your life as an entrepreneur worthwhile.

You could easily overdo if you only think about $227 a month. "Well, $227 is nothing. We could easily allocate $1000 a month on tooling. Therefore, let's go on a 6-month adventure of finding the best of the best tools, that are the hottest trend in the market".

My sense of it was that they were used to having/using all that and so when it tallies to $227, it's not really worth arguing about.

We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure.

There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected.

There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well.

But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely.

To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them.

You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.

Cost aside, it just complicates your workplace and makes your success dependent on the continued performance of other companies. What if slack pushes an update that everyone in your office hates, or shuts down as a company one day? In the words of Bane, it would be extremely painful, for you.

However, if you were old school and used IRC, you would have 40 years of documentation to help you solve any issues, and you probably won't have very much issues to begin with since people have been publicly using the protocol for 40 years and improving the experience. Plus it would be free and you wouldn't be dependent on anyone but yourselves staying in business.

> Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels

If you're using Slack solely for the purpose of talking to your co-founder over a few categorized channels then the price is definitely not worth it over using email etc. IMO - unless you're willing to pay $13 a month to click on reaction emojis.

However Slack's ability to be used as a sort of centralized dashboard for most if not all of the other services listed on the blog article might just be convenient enough to merit that price point. In addition to supporting customers and probably being able to chat with them right through the app, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they've set up one-click integrations for the other paid suites including Sentry, LinkedIn Sales, Hubspot.

Emojis are like coffee. They make doing a tedious thing more exciting.

There are parts of work that are intrinsically exciting. But there are also parts of work that are just tedious, and you just need to get through them.

Their product is built on the Slack platform. They probably need (and want) to be paid users if not for anything more than having a better understanding of their customer.

Why you’d start (and fund?!) a business built entirely on a “hip” chat client, in a world where we’ve seen how walled gardens have ruined business models overnight (mobile app stores) is the real question. But it’s not my money (or apparently the blog authors either). So spend away!

The reason is simple: Because there is a demand and multiple companies have already built successful products through this. Companies born from platforms is nothing new and makes plenty of sense.

Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

Always wondered that myself. I can't "get it" since I'm not a Slack user (nor a Discord user), though I interacted with both

Negative stigma?

I personally don't use it because everywhere I've seen it previously is in gaming/twitch communities.

Is it still required to have a phone to sign up for discord? That's what puts me off.

That's never been required as far as I know?

Anyway...you all have phones right ;-)

We all have Social Security Numbers too (in the US). Doesn’t mean we should share them with anyone who asks.

It's not required for everyone — only people Discord find suspicious for some reason.

Honestly, it's probably because it's marketed towards gamers. It's a really useful product for sure but the gamer marketing definitely affects people's perception.

I think in the past they did make a point of saying they don't support business use. As in, it's fine if you want to, but don't pin your daily success on it and complain if it breaks.

I use it at home and it does occasionally go a bit weird and need a reboot, or stop sending notifications on my phone. Not a big deal for me.

For what it's worth, most gaming startups I know (including my own) seem to use Discord.

1. Can't share large files with discord

2. Customer service doesn't respond quickly even with nitro plan

3. Confusing UX

Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.

That could be seen as an advantage

This. For any serious discussion you need to have topics and async slow-motion discussions for them. Like forums.

Slack should definitely add a 'forum-like' kind of channel before someone creates a new 'forums with native client' product.

If you need threads, there's always email. No need to reinvent the wheel solely because the app is written in electron and gives off pleasing beeps.

It’s part marketing, part functionality. For example, with Slack you can filter sign ups based on email. That being said, I would still love a discord for work where chat and invites overlays on top of a working document.

It doesn't have the "enterprisy" integrations that give companies control they want, such as where you integrate logins with your AD/SSO/whatever system. You could kick employees that leave from your server, but that doesn't mean there's no company information in their DMs with other employees. You can insist people set up a work account, but you still can't deactivate it when they leave.

You can't enforce password length requirements, or whatever your security team recommends this year.

You can't disable parts of the offering, like voice chat, to enforce people use hangouts or whatever your company wide solution is.

At the same time, things companies may want employees to do easily but gaming communities don't want, such as allowing any user to create a channel are not possible with Discord's permission model.

If you want users to see only self-selected subsets of information, you can't really. You could break your company's chat across multiple servers, but this is tedious compared to just having channels users can join or not. For example, in my last employer, I was in 40 or so channels out of several thousand.

---

I think for a startup or small business, none of these things are that important. But for medium or large companies, they become more of a problem.

I agree. All those tools support more roles that two people could reasonably cover. Might they need some of these tools eventually? Of course - once there two or more additional team members.

As it is, they need a tool for keeping track of all these tools.

Also, I wonder how much time they waste switching between tools and managing them (accounts, settings & preferences, payments, upgrading plans, checking release notes, news & other notification emails, etc).

Don’t using 28 productivity tools make you less productive eventually?

Figma is pretty awesome. I’m on the free licence but deffo see the value. You can collaborate on designs, hand off easily to devs and build quick prototypes.

The tool pays for itself pretty fast.

It's pretty cool but I wish scrolling around wasn't infinitely slow.

I agree with the point about tool fetishization: it could be just another form of "playing house". That said, optimizing these sums of money is also not going to make you successful. If the tools are providing value then use them and don't fret over $0 vs $10 vs $20 a month. The more important thing is keeping cognitive load low by using simple systems and driving mental focus on the right things.

To take an example: I wouldn't bat an eye at paying for Slack for a two-person startup because A) the integrations means I get centralized notifications and search for updates to all the tools I'm using essentially for free with no ops overhead, B) the mobile push notifications and per-channel settings are nicely tunable to ensure I'm on top of things without getting notification fatigue, and C) I'm already on 10 other Slacks, so it's not adding much overhead to my life overall.

You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating.

This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of all inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.

True but you don’t pay subscription for your chairs. You do pay rent, but in many case the sum of SaaS subscription is in the same order of magnitude as the rent.

Is this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers here tend to earn roughly the same number, but in a different currency, which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We use Discord for communication, Gitlab for source control, vscode for writing code, and... honestly, what else do you even need to run a software company anyway?

At my last startup, the total monthly subscription cost was the $1 Bitwarden tier (granted, we were tiny). And yes, a Ryzen system bolted to a $10 lackrack was entirely sufficient for our hosting needs.

Lackrack is magnificent. First time i am seeing this.

Lackracks have been around since the early 2000s at least, probably earlier than that, even. There's a whole range of Ikea hacks that exist (and dedicated websites for them). Highly recommend perusing the wide range of options if you like the Lackrack!

Look at the history of google. Enclosures made of LEGO, and just laying motherboards on sheets of cardboard in shelves rather than buying “server pc”s. This kind of attitude plus the quality of their search, was what got them enthusiastically funded before they had any idea of revenue.

(They took so long to figure out the revenue model that they almost had the money taken back by the VCs, and had a CEO thrust upon them)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ServerPorn/comments/2rbwlh/home_lac...

Is that a country with good internet connections for consumers and small companies? Here in Germany I wouldn't dare to run a lackrack server in the office, because the internet connection is crap almost everywhere.

Many otherwise crappy countries, especially in Eastern Europe, have excellent ISPs for some reason.

Because they didn’t have a functional telecom monopoly at the end of the Cold War, so built all new infrastructure, not just wiring plant but organizationally as well. While the old western countries had strong monopolies or cartels with regulatory capture. Of course not every one of the eastern states got this, and some “entrenched” systems worked out fine too (e.g. South Korea and Singapore).

But in the case of Eastern Europe, where neoliberal ideology gripped most of the newly independent states, this is one of the few examples, but quite a good one, of where that ideology did in fact work out exactly as intended, for good.

> neoliberal ideology gripped most of the newly independent states

I wish. There was a great liberal leap forward in the 90s, but now it's state-run economy all over again.

I think it wa a disaster for Russia, didn't really happen in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova; meh for Romainia, Bulgaria, pretty good for some of the Warsaw countries west of those (DDR a special case). Anything can be exploited (communism or complete liberalism/libertarianism and everything between) but the people who did the best* seemed to have taken less an ideological view and more of a pick and choose with a slight lean against the old system. Places like Czech for example.

I'm talking about the 1990s and early 00s.

* I wound't agree with them all, even the successful ones...but as none of them are my country it's not really any of my business except to learn via observation.

> I think it wa a disaster for Russia,

Quite the opposite - the GDP rose dramatically, the standard of living too.

> I'm talking about the 1990s and early 00s.

That's the problem: these policies have a delayed effect. They were inacted in early 90s, and the country reaped all their benefits in mid 00s, while they were already scaled back and revamped. And for the last 5-10 years of stagnation have been the direct result of the latter.

In US, I’m seeing the culture of hacking your own hardware dying. Everyone wants to use stuff that takes 5 mins setup (long term rent costs don’t matter), doesn’t need any wires or screws, or maintenance - only what is in my wallet. That applies to most startups, and now started also propagating up to larger companies (although those have more stringent controls).

In terms of developing software - it’s the same there as hardware - noone wants to deal with their own databases or servers anymore, so it’s all cloud/aws, and now they don’t want to deal with OS anymore, so it’s all dynamo/cloud functions/lambdas etc. Try developing software for all this offline, without being wired into a giant cloud company infra.

it's as if everyone is working towards a quick exit rather than long term sustainability. Few startups seem to care about profitability and bootatrapping, it's all about hypergrowth, mostly using investor money.

Gitlab is a good example, we had to leave the free tier in order to get features that Gitlab specifically chose to be in the paid tier because their absence is a big blocker when you grow... So we pay $100/mo/seat on Gitlab.

We also use at least 10 paid general-purpose tools that each fill a real need (we don't keep tools we don't use):

- Notion for knowledge management

- Airtable to manage operations data (not customer data)

- Hubspot for Sales and Marketing

- Lattice for HR

- Spendesk for expenses management

- Quickbooks for accounting

- Typeform for various customer feedback

- Zoom for remote work and link between our offices

- GSuite for everything in it

- Figma for UI design

- Recruitee for recruitment management

And finally, add also at least 10 paid Engineering-specific tools:

- Gitlab of course

- AWS for hosting of course

- Cloudflare for DNS stuff

- Sentry for error reporting

- Crowdin for internationalization

- FullStory for UX studies

- Apollo engine to get decent analytics about our backend

- Webflow for our Website (Not for the webapp of course)

- Pagerduty for operations

- We used Cloudcraft at some point to have an idea how our AWS stack look like

I could go on... But in the end, you end up with ~10 Saas tools peer seat, with costs from $2 to $100 per tool. And it is valuable, we pay them because they are worth it. But yes this is an interesting trend...

What do you use Gitlab for at the Gold tier that you don't get at Silver? The price jump for us was just too much but we did spring for Silver after dropping self-hosted Jenkins, self-hosted npm, Jira, and Github.

You might like this issue they just merged up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/37081

Roadmaps and single-level epics coming to Silver.

> True but you don’t pay subscription for your chairs.

But in reality you kind of do - chairs are still a depreciating asset that require upkeep and maintenance. I recall at my last medium-sized company (500ish people) that every quarter they had guys come in to fix the broken chairs. I don't think the chairs were bad quality, it's just that in a company that size where the chairs got a ton of use that every quarter you'd have 10-20 chairs that needed fixing.

Startups tend to have a desire to keep capital costs as low as possible because the need to be nimble and respond quickly and deploy capital efficiently is much more important than the meager savings you'd get from buying vs. subscribing. You rarely if ever see startups buying their office space vs. renting for similar reasons.

500 people damaging 10-20 chairs per quarter is absurd, to the point of hiring a specific chair guy to come in and repair sounds like satire. My fraternity didn't even break that many chairs from people getting hammered and throwing them off the roof, and I oversaw the budget.

If I had to guess, it's people gaming the chair replacement system. This might seem surprising but its really not, employees love to do this if at all possible at any company.

My friend was just gloating to me how he finessed an $1600 standing desk and got the company to pay for it. $1600 to do what a stack of books does under your keyboard. They ordered that ridiculous desk the day he emailed the office manager about it without question, because standing desks are so hot right now in the office paraphernalia world.

You don't normally have to do security reviews of your cups and plates, is one difference that comes to mind.

True and a good point. Though you also don't have to do security reviews for most saas's, just third party libraries that you add to your product.

From the other side (vendor perspective) we see this SaaS fatigue a lot.

We have a free, open source, unlimited use product that has a very good, commercial, alternative. What we hear in calls is that there are just too many SaaS tools in the company and the monthly cost (or security review of all tools) ends up with the management saying "pick your top 5,10,15 most important" and drop the rest.

The GSuites, Slacks, AWS, Notions, Zooms, etc (picking from the article list) get in the top priority list and that list is so full the medium priority stuff just gets crossed out and pushed down to budgets lower down. Our category just rarely makes it.

A lot of the time we win out just because the company wants to avoid the admin of the paid solution, the tool just isn't _that_ important. Being creative in your business model, I think, is the way to go, particularly in terms of freemium offerings.

With the number of SaaS apps trying to get your monthly cost, being outside the core list is getting harder and harder and you need to define those niches and totally own them. Forget starting at the company level, start with 1-5 people groups for a _long_ time.

I’m assuming you’re talking about draw.io. What’s your business model?

Charging only for Atlassian integrations, that’s where the revenue/effort ratio is best.

As an aside, draw.io (now diagrams.net I see, why the change?) is a nice tight project.

I was an early adopter (i.e. from beta releases) of lucidchart and really liked their first few years; convinced two companies to get a bunch of licenses. Over time they've become a hot mess of bad patterns in SAAS and I won't touch them for a few years now (and let a license for ~100 people expire).

Congrats on keeping things simple and not making it harder to use over time.

The popup on the page links to an article that explains why: https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams-net

Basically they're dropping the .io domain for security and ethical concerns, and the old name being the full domain is probably why that leads to a full rebrand

Makes sense, I missed that link somehow.

A one-person startup uses not less than yours :) https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin...

It's a good thing that we can outsource tasks to 3rd party SaaS for a small fee, rather than hiring full-time employees

Thanks for providing that link. It's not very often I would come back to a thread just to comment on a website. The vast amount of content available quickly is impressive.

The tagline is podcast searching like google. How do you keep discovering new content like google, are you running your own crawler?

I love this post. Have you upgraded PyCharm to make use of the Django support in your IDE?

It’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use.

I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless (https://usegripeless.com). If you look at the Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the internet, you’ll see a lot of commenters saying “this is too expensive”, “I don’t see anyone buying this” or something along those lines. I was skeptical too, but we tried it on the production site anyways, since the integration took less than 10 minutes.

Turns out it’s more than paid for itself in the first month. We immediately caught 3 important issues and fixed them. I thought the value-add would stop here: our startup gained an unquantifiable amount of value (a la fixing bugs we would never catch otherwise). But it turns out there was a hidden treasure even more valuable and concrete. I personally reached out to the 3 users who submitted a Gripe, letting them know we were fixing their issue right away and asking if they wanted to hop on a phone call sometime. This effectively onboarded all 3 of them. I feel confident that Gripeless is going to continue to drive much more revenue than it costs.

That experience has led me to be less apprehensive about spending cash on additional tools. I’m not going to sign up for 28 of them, but I am more opening to trying them out and quickly cutting them if they don’t work.

That's the main issue of purchasing products and services for you business, i.e it's almost impossible to gauge the real value of what you are buying until you try it out and can analyze the figures. This is why it's crazy that so many sass providers still require credit cards upfront or have an arbitrary 14 days trial period instead of having a free plan with unlimited trial period. It removes so many obstacles from the founder's decision-making process without costing the provider much money.

Sometimes it’s hard to come up with an adequately differentiated set of features for free vs paid, especially when you’re still in or close to the mvp phase.

Hotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.

I'm also biased because I work on Gripeless. Our product isn't really about broadly collecting feedback as a whole, but it instead focuses specifically on the negative feedback part and tries to make it as pleasant and friction-less as possible for the end user to submit.

HotJar's feedback tool is built around getting all kinds of feedback, both positive and negative, which is generally fine if you want to improve your product satisfaction when comparing "happiness" at different time frames, but it does come with some caveats.

Since people don't want to be rude by nature it's less likely that they'd explicitly pick the most angry face option on HotJar's happiness slider and submit their complain then - as they, again, would have to explicitly state that they're dissatisfied.

Submitting a gripe through Gripeless on the other hand takes just a single text field, no emotions, no decisions - users can simply quickly fire out their issue(s) at the product owner without any suspected judgement - since complaints are very clearly solicited.

Again, I'm super biased because I'm the solo founder of Gripeless and competing against a much more established company like HotJar is not easy, as an early stage company we can't afford to give out our product for free just yet (apart from OSS projects which we always give out our product to for $0), but I try very very hard to satisfy our current customers' specific needs, something that a larger company can't offer at scale.

Also if anyone reading is interested I'm doing demo's and answering concerns via quick 5 minute calls, feel free to reach me at [redacted]

I'd never heard of Gripeless before this thread, but I can agree with your reasoning.

We use HotJar's free plan on an interal (engineer-facing) tool and we get very very few reports through it because engineers don't realize there's a text field AFTER the happiness slider.

We get an order of magnitude more feedback via Jira even though creating a ticket that way takes 10x more clicks.

I’d personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials plan. I know, because I did, and it’s so much easier to manage and it’s also cheaper.

I’m not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it’s really much of the same where I genuinely don’t really like any of the options. But because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it.

I think if you got the full teams/one-note experience on the essential plan that it might be better, but you don’t get the full experience in the browser. One example is that you can use Excel inside Onenote in the browser. But since I don’t really like slack or the g-suite stuff either, it’s basically the same with less hassle.

I find this interesting, It shouldn't take much time before we have a new category of startups:

- that lets you (as a startup) optimize spending on day-to-day tools (similar to optimizing your cloud spendings)

I'm currently looking into digital whiteboarding solutions, Miro & Mural seem to be the tools of choice, but both are so expensive that I'd rather hold my nose and wait for Microsoft to invest in the Web Version of Whiteboard instead of spending another 4000$/yr on a SaaS App that gets used by 5 people 2 times a weeks and 30 people once every quarter...

MS Teams is very buggy/has less features, we're researching other tools atm.

Yes we tried to switch to Teams from Slack ... but everyone hated it with passion. Hate is not good for productivity...

My thoughts exactly!

I think the less features is an advantage. But they certainly don’t work as well if you’re web-only and getting access to the actual desktop applications is a more expensive license.

I don’t particularly like teams, I do like planner and onenote colaboration, but I also really, really dislike slack, so that has to weigh into what you take from my opinion on the subject.

Ok, to be fair - Teams video calls is much better than hangouts we were using earlier.

We do like chatting where threads are not a second thought like Slack (and UX is not "perfect" for threads).

But major pain point for us is sharing code snippets or inline code in chat, inline code - just doesn't work and code snippets - really buggy, forget syntax highlighting.

A counterpoint (also based on personal experience): recently moved from a company that uses Office365 to a one that uses GSuite. Communications and document sharing feels far more simpler and productive. I can't quite put my finger on why, but working on GSuite just feels faster and less clunkier.

We have both – everyone in the company uses GSuite, and then ~10% of the company use Excel and Outlook (connected to Gmail) for particular business requirements.

The technical support for the Office 365 part is roughly the same load as the technical support for the GSuite part.

I share this experience. My company switched to Office365 from GSuite. It feels universally like a step down. The workers who all used MS desktop products liked it, but everyone I work with it had expressed nothing but disdain.

We are using Office 365. Outlook's search, spam management and filtering tools are very poor compared to Gmail.

Spending much time in gsuite sucks compared to native 365 apps running on your machine synced to onedrive. Really smooth experience even on macos which was a surprise for me.

The Teams UI has some huge blind spots.

Now, you can finally sort-of-almost-reliably switch between different accounts. This used to just not work, for me.

But you still can't see what account you're actually logged in with. I can only see my initials and name - and my initials and name's the same for all 4 MS accounts I have (private/family, employer, client 1, client 2).

When you press "back" from an open document, you don't go back to the folder you opened it from, but to the root of the document library.

The conferencing generally works OK-ish, but sometimes it just used another audio device that it says in the settings. The simplest solution is to reboot. Sometimes it works to switch device, re-start teams, and then switch device again.

You can look at such imperfections from another angle.

Think about it, you don't like the product because of issues you've described. You're still using it. Maybe, M$ got the product right on the parts you're really care about? Like office integration, price and so on.

Messengers is a very competitive space: slack, m$ teams, zulip, mattermost, skype, telegram and so on and so on.

My point here is issues you described just minor inconvenience and they wouldn't bring much value.

They got the product right in the areas my IT department cares about - included in O365 license, and the illusion of integrated account management.

As I hinted at in my comment, account management is a pain point for us users - but probably not for the ones managing the users in a company.

If you and your cofounder are already used to trello why is

> because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it.

a compelling argument to switch. The time and irritation I spend "getting used to it" could be spent learning, designing, schlepping, and re-planning my way to product-market fit in my core competency.

I believe the attention cost of using and keeping up with so many great tools is underappreciated. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather use Github Projects than Trello not because GHP is better (it is not) but because I'm already using Github, and the mental and workflow cost of adding Trello to the mix is (I feel) higher than its additional value.

Notion in particular drives me nuts. I mean it's very very well done, but you use it to create a hierarchy of collaborative documents... because apparently GSuite docs are not good enough? Notion I think is a case of local maxima, because Gdocs/Office365 offer so many more ways to keep documentation and data in better formats (doc, sheet, slides...).

Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of a thousand good things. :)

Agreed. Notion feels quite a bit complex. May be I just don’t understand it yet. I understand AirTable’s value prop. It’s pretty straightforward.

IMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible, because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets funded and has more resources.

Author says it's a 2 person startup. We use communication and collaboration tools such as Skype, Google docs, Dropbox, WhatsApp, etc for personal communication which costs €0.

Some of the expenses mentioned in the article can be easily taken off with those free tools which are just as good, if not better. If you develop an in-house tool for comms and collaboration, it will be an overkill for even a big startup.

On the flip side of that, we use three react libraries at my job: react-table, react-dates, and react-select.

If we had been OK just using whatever styles they gave us, it would have been fine. But we have a designer who designs how everything is supposed to look. And even the "style-less" react components have been a nightmare. Just a constant train of bugs to fix, and they still barely function.

It would have been way faster to start from scratch, in my opinion. This has all been over 6 months, so it's not like there was some initial payoff period either.

As a frontend dev, this really pains me. I’ve worked at many places with the same problems - first of all, pushing back on the designer is incredibly important if something is hard to develop. Most designers are doing their best to make things easy to code, but aren’t developers, so they just don’t know. It’s the engineers job to tell them no when things are exceptionally difficult. If they understand that the style change they want is a 3 month project, maybe they would be happy to design something different.

Secondly, frontend is hard. Having a senior react dev who can accurately weigh the trade offs of using external components like that would have been invaluable here. People underestimate how much different in skill level a junior react/frontend dev is from a senior engineer with experience in multiple frameworks. 6 months is long time in terms of dev hours - writing a table from scratch for your use case that works with design is usually a 1-2 sprint task, and that’s absolutely the hardest one there. But more reasonably, work should have been done to make a reusable style library to make this even easier.

Writing data tables isn’t easy. Deffo not a 1-2 week thing and you call it done. The trail of bug fixes and browser edge cases are what slowly get you at the end.

+1 on not letting design dictate. Just gotta sit in the room and weigh pros and cons.

1-2 sprints, which for most teams is 4-6 weeks. It really depends on use cases... generally startups don't have any need to support old browsers and can enforce current Chrome+Firefox only.

I think there is something to be said about companies jumping on to sexy software like Slack et al just because other lemmings have jumped off the cliff. If I worked in a two person startup I would be using SMS/IRC and email before paying for a slack subscription.

If I had any more people I would still be taking a hard look at existing, well-understood, open technologies before signing my soul to a private company in business solely due to shackling other companies to their proprietary software, and dealing with their lock in when they inevitably fail me and my needs at a random date in the future.

Then again, I'm also not one of those people who believe the world changed when slack was released, so maybe I'm a little biased.

Company I work for has grown to 10 people and the pricing per member things are getting out of hand. We had to drop some services, bc if there is a service that costs 10 per user for just one feature, it's they add up real quick (looking at you slack for example).

Some services have free tier or special pricing if it's only couple of members, but once you exhaust that, you are dropped to full pricing. I think there is a opportunity for different pricing for growing companies between 5-25 people.

It seems that this pay per member works for small companies, couple of people or huge ones. But if you are growing with limited revenue the costs are way too high while you are still also finding your market.

No reason to look at Slack like that. It may be well worth the price.

When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email.

It's pretty big deal. And that's why they can charge that level of subscription.

Compared to a salary, it is nothing. If your company functions and people are more productive because of it, ~$80 a year is nothing.

I’d be more productive without slack.

It’s useful for distributed teams, and for incident response, but basic messaging + jira/github + zoom cover those use cases better.

Slack was OK before the bot stuff and integration with ldap/email groups landed. Now, it’s at least as spammy as email, except not searchable, the (non customizable) UI is worse, and the social norm is that you spend 100% of the day checking a firehose of broadcast messages and machine generated spam (in some teams, even after working hours).

> When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email.

That's exactly why I dislike Slack. You lose the whole history of your communication because Slack history is not very navigable.

I have concluded that existing businesses and other certain factors limit the application of what I am about to say to a subset, but there is great room for a holistic "here is your IT stack" company that focuses on open source tooling, reduction of stack complexity, and working out many of the oft-repeated learning curves.

It's a huge market opportunity waiting to happen, because death or at least injury by a thousand licensing fee cuts is real. Small startups, small businesses looking to modernize, non-profits, etc would all be potential customers, and unlike the coast-centric viewpoint of HN, those tend to actually be the vast majority of companies in middle America.

Many MSP's and various resellers and salesmen make a living off trapping these in lock-in also. I have seen all of this over many years first hand. There is a reason Spiceworks took off so fast. There is also a reason they are hemorrhaging customers... because Spiceworks entire model was built around advertising lock-in type products to customers. (also their tooling sorta sucks, despite being easy and having a decent web front-end)

Isn't that what MS, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Amazon, and Google do?

Not at all. They provide little pieces. Businesses still have to cobble them together. Which is my whole point.

Yes. I want to pay $500/user-month and get all the internal services and support of a big company, but for my small company. I want all the dev and ops tools to be chosen and integrated already, with maintained tutorials. This product can accelerate innovation.

Sublime Text isn't free. https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text

Well, kind of (at least last time I used it, which was Sublime Text 2). They say it's an evaluation but there is no time-limit, just an annoying popup every now and then (or on start? Can't remember) but it's effectively free if you're OK with that.

I mean, basically all desktop software is free if you’re okay with violating the license. Not something I’d advise if you’re trying to run a business.

Parent is correct. But business would want to buy a licease for support more than fear of legal threat or Oracle shakedown.

https://www.sublimetext.com/2

Support for a text editor?

Not at all because usually you have to circumvent some protection they have, and in that case the intent is to continue using the software in a way they didn't intend and probably breaking some agreement you made when installing/downloading.

In the Sublime Text case, they explicitly give you unlimited time to trial the software and buy it if you get value from it (which, if you do, please buy it [and same with other software] so we can make the world go around). Their license seems to explicitly say that you can evaluate it until you either stop using it or buy it, without breaking any agreement.

Edit: I should clarify more about my own position about it before it gets taken with the wrong idea in mind. I do agree that if you do continuously use Sublime Text (or other software with similar license/trials) and get value from it, you should absolutely buy it to support the developers. Continuing to use beyond that would not be the ethical thing to do. But it does seem like the developers of Sublime Text are confident enough that people who can afford it and gets value from it, will eventually purchase a license. Which, since the company still exists, seems to work out, and that's great to see.

You can use Sublime Text 2 forever.

https://www.sublimetext.com/2

Sublime Text 2 may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation.

You can use use it forever without a license, but you shouldn't.

There are lots of honour based / social contracts that essentially function because enough of us abide by them. If enough people do not, they go away.

Or as the saying goes, "this is why we can't have nice things."

So someone should uninstall the program and download a true open source product like vscode. Because using it by the terms listed on the download page is breaking a social contract. If we don't no one will offer a free editor again?

- There is a reason they offered a free unlimited trial. They were unknown and by offering it for free they increased popularity, increased business / education licenses sold. By me switching to another editor I stop telling people I use that editor my company stops purchasing that license. We all lose. Nevermind version 3 doesn't have that wording, so version 2 can be seen as a gateway product to onboard developers into version 3.

- Even though vscode is open source by supporting that editor you are supporting big microsoft over a much smaller company. Long term this hurts small developers more. I think open source can hurt small players when used by larger corps trying to get you to buy into there paid ecosystem.

VSCode is not "true open source product". It's event not open source. It's "open core", i.e. proprietary version of "code" project with additional proprietary components: telemetry, special configuration and so on.

To give them benefit of the doubt, they may have already paid for it, and as it's a one time fee not included it in their monthly costs.

It has a yearly subscription fees if the license is bought for use in a business

From the FAQ

Using a Personal License at Work As licenses are per-user, you're welcome to use your license key on all computers where you are the primary user, including at work.

Another piece of fluff software reinventing the wheel for profit. I can have most of those features with a decent .nanorc config.

I feel like a big portion of the apps you accomplish similar things. To name a few, Airtable, Notion, and Trello can all do CRM funnel, product roadmap and issue tracking. Even though 2 out of 3 are free, you guys could probably condense them into a centralized spot.

Additionally, one could sacrifice on features and use GitHub projects instead of Trello. That’s what we do at work. Not great, but pretty painless for tracking dev work

Sure, but in this particular example, they're on the free Trello tier, and I'd say it's already more full-featured than GitHub projects.

Btw, another cool alternative that I've been playing with lately is ClickUp, which also has a generous free tier.

And on a general note, given that these days all of these systems have good APIs and export capabilities, I'd say there isn't that much business case to consolidate to fewer systems.

They only spend $227/month in total. Why even bother centralizing? That's peanuts. I spend more than that on my personal AWS bill.

Funny and here i am trying to save 5 usd/month because my VPS is overpowered.

It really depends on where you live. 227usd is certainly not peanuts.

Is that for a personal or commercial project?

Both actualy i am freelancer and these two are sort of interchangeable.

They're running a startup. If they can't turn $227 into orders of magnitude more they're not going to succeed.

When I was poor I stuck everything on very cheap machines too so I know what it means to have different constraints. Those constraints rarely mesh well with running a startup.

It's fun seeing the comments here and the two sides of this. For me, being a team of 1, I pay for gsuite, Streak, Calendly, Docsend, Hellosign, and github. When I add a few staff members, I'll happily pay for Slack and Notion.

Yes, it's a lot of subscriptions for a tiny team, but if the combination of all of those (or heck even one of them) saves me 2-3 hours per month, it's worth it. If I close one deal, it's worth it. But really I love that I can set up a few zaps on Zapier and write a few API calls and it frees me up to spend my time thinking about higher-value things.

I get vendor fatigue and I understand that many of these tools get really expensive as you scale, but I'm pretty thrilled to live in a time when I can find tools that I can make talk to each other for a relatively low monthly cost.

> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)

If the service you're providing is valuable, you should pay for it too. You don't need to actually funnel the money through your payment processors giving them a cut, just do it as an accounting exercise, showing the revenue on the books.

It also helps you quantify your pricing yourself. If you're not willing to pay $x/month for your service, why would your customers? What do you need to change to make it worth $x/month to you? Do you need to change $x to be $x-y (or $x+y? Are you under charging?)

Anyway, great list, great post, thanks for sharing, and best of luck with your product!

What is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team?

Also Github? You can now have private repos with up to three collaborators for free.

They are free for personal private repos. Team private repos aren't!

I think OP is trying to say they don't need to pay for the Pro or for the Team as there are just two collaborators, the free version includes 3 collaborators on private repos. https://github.com/pricing

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I suppose having the code in a personal repo gives the repo owner more power? I've never founded a startup, so not sure how typical cofounder trust dynamics are.

> What is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team?

You get Gmail and the other services on your own domain instead of a gmail.com address.

I'm an even smaller team (me, myself, and I) and I pay for G Suite for that reason.

I pay for G Suite as a freelancer. It lets me use my own domain for email and meeting requests instead of an @gmail account.

The $7/month option is flexible enough for a small company and is not per user, thus negligible.

The per user options start to add up...

Please consider paying/donating for smaller “free” tools like sublime etc.

It would be interesting to see this kind of list for the "start-ups" in '90s. I guess Windows and MS Office licenses would be unavoidable items on the list.

Remember when web pages linked to other web pages?

I feel this on a near-spiritual level.

Once you factor in communication tools (including but not limited to...project management, email, calendar, chat, VOIP, and CRM) alongside your "real" technical stuff that actually powers your services or products, you invariably end up with a ton of different tools because nobody has the time to even try to build all those different core components.

There's a ton of friction to doing anything differently. For example, I'm fairly anti-google. Therefore, I host my own email. Doing that, even in the most simplistic way possible, means utilizing several tools or technologies (mailinabox + a deliverability service being the most simplistic I can imagine). A larger operation would certainly have more specific needs that would require another approach - and the human effort of implementation and maintenance that goes with it.

We have a handful of people, in 3 different countries, each requiring differing currencies (USD, GBP, EURO). Our client base is global. Combine the operational complexity with everything else and even a small operation can start to feel like a fortune 500 company.

As a B2B startup building an enterprise product, we've had to be wary of using external services as a part of our offering. Our customers prefer predictable/fixed-annual pricing and do not sign up for saas pricing models, especially the ones that cost a lot at scale. Also, this eats into our margins as the external service has no obligation/contract to reduce prices.

I'm rewatching Mad Men now, and I'm amazed how many people in that era were busy on administrative tasks that are completely automated now – set on 2010s, this series would be about a boutique digital agency that would employ under 10 people, total. This list of software may be long, but without it, it wouldn't be possible to do this with just a 2-person team.

Truth is you don't need most of SaaS when you start. No-one is saying this out-loud because a lot of SaaS users are also SaaS selles.

Sentry, use free tier or self host or use Bugsnag free tier

Slack, use Skype instead

Notion, use Google Docs instead

AirTable, use Google Sheets

Office/coworking, work from home or cafes!

These huge usage of other SaaS is caused by venture backed companies with a lot of cash looking for an IPO. In practice if you are boostraped instead of venture based you don't want to have a lot of SaaS and/or hire a lot of employees. Some things like bragging about how many employees or SaaS you are using only make sense in venture-back land because by spending more you are getting to the IPO/exit faster but you are sacrificing future long term margins (which you don't care about since you will be long gone).

I'm a solo bootstrap founder and yes you can clearly see how I'm biased against venture-backed startups! :D

I was shocked by the headline, then I noticed that only over a third of the tools are used for development.

I was again shocked by their monthly spending, considering the stage they're at[1], but then I noticed that over two thirds are spent on marketing.

So all in all, it makes sense; they're paying for what they deem required to use. I couldn't justify to myself using half of these tools, at least, at that stage.

[1]: Which highlights how good we, in general, have it for at least prototyping stuff freely, or very cheaply.

On that note, I got so confused by a couple of their bills that I had to stop and see if the tools had some sort of restriction for businesses. Nope, so I don't understand why they're paying for some of them. I mean, they certainly should if they want to, after all, such tools are damn good services worth paying for, but they don't strictly need to.

If you’re using free Heroku dynos, the first visitor in a while will experience long load times because the dyno has to be spun up. This is a pretty bad experience. I’d spend the 7 dollars each month to make sure your dyno is always up.

https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/

Heroku limits the number of hours you can have up - 550 a month ( https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours ). So if you have a system with real users, you really should just pay the $7 a month.

Additionally any deploy will give users a moment of downtime because Heroku only supports rolling deploys on paid dynos.

That's a bit scary on one hand, it's pretty amazing though how much free value you can get from OS or Freemium tools. We use e.g. the free versions of RocketChat and Gitlab, they work great and we didn't have many problems administrating them (once a short outage due to a full disk, but gitlab.com had multiple outages in the same time frame). So I think if you are willing to put a little effort into self hosting you have a lot of choices available. Deployment and maintenance has become easier as well with tools like Ansible and Docker.

I wonder if the $$ emphasis is the wrong way to look at this list. I'm wondering about: - time to train on how to use it * every employee you ever get (some of them it's trivial, others not so much) - time to do security reviews of any of them where sensitive information might ever pass through it (which is most of them) - the risk of lock-in to something that gets bought by a competitor, turned into adware, or acquihired and shut down (in some cases switching is trivial, in others not so much without losing a lot of valuable history)

Why use both Notion and Trello for product/feature planning?

28 tools, and no password manager? Oof.

For "core" accounts, make sure you've got 2FA on. Google for starters. Also anything to do with code, hosting, or finances.

Why is Slack needed if GSuite is there. It's decent for chat in a small Startup.

Also Google meet does basic video conferencing bearable. Zoom may be an overkill.

The tool they are building appears to integrate heavily with slack.

Oh ok. Then makes sense.

I was curious way the author used Slack for 2 people until I saw their SaaS is a plugin for Slack. As I mentioned in my other comments, startups selling a SaaS spend so much time writing copies and doing sales pitch of how their SaaS product is a must-have that they start to believe that also others SaaS are must-have.

SaaS selling to SaaS might turn into a Ponzi piramid scheme if left unchecked.

Subscribe to Zoho One. 40+ integrated apps at $30 /user /month with an annual subscription (All Employee Pricing).

https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/ https://www.zoho.com/one/

Just curious, do you work for Zoho?

Yes

I'd be interested to see your disaster recovery plans for each choice you've made. When any of those fail what do you do for continuity? How do you back up your data?

What's your failover time between the site being down or other issue and being able to switch to different service?

Or is there no plan because all websites are assumed always up... ?

There are certain dev tools like Gitlab/Github or AWS/GCP for your product. Besides can't things be simplified to just a couple of tools

Like just 1. Gsuite/Office 365 2. Asana/Notion

I am building a startup (Early stages) & think about this. I want to create one or two tools & use it.

Why need airtable, notion & trello at the same time?

One thing i've noticed about markets is that when there a little to choose from you buy few tools, but expect them to do more, and you are prepared to invest time into learning them. However if there are a lot to choose from, you want more simple tools, dont want to invest time, and prefer the tools you already know.

For about $230 a month the amount of functionalities a startup gets, compared to what would have been possible a decade ago, is truly enviable (at least for founders like me who are old). The nett capabilities at $2800 per year is roughly 1% of what a full time employee would cost the company. The times we live in!

Some open source companies offer free use of their product if your product or organisation is open source as well. For our tool[0] we got offered free use of Gitlab Gold and a Sentry account for error tracking.

[0] https://websecuritymap.org/

We at Levels.fyi are also a two person team at the moment. We use free versions of most services (helps that we’re only 2 people) and essentially are only paying for AWS. We’ve always found that there are cheap high quality alternatives to a lot of well known tools. We pay less than $30 / month.

What is the value of Figma ($24 / month for Designing product mocks..) Why not just get the Adobe Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop,... I am really curious, as I am trying to create a design tool too. What is so great about it? Is there some USP?

I am running a small bootstrapped venture and use a lot of very low cost apps. It works well, particularly as integration tools become much more sophisticated. Loosely coupled looks messy but wins over tightly coupled big enterprise systems

I have made this tool, which tries to help with this kind of situation: https://aamu.app/

It already has quite a bit of features, but more features come quite regularly.

why don't you use basecamp ? It does says it replaces quite a number of tools.

I wonder, what is it they missing on $6 GSuite plan, so they need $12 one?

I think it’s because there are 2 of them, each on the $6 plan. G Suite charges per person.

Suddenly my lab's Cloudron + droplet costs seem low. Just the Cloudron subscrption opens up a world of easy to deploy and maintain open productivity tools with linked accounts.

Find it interesting that they're paying for premium versions of all those tools yet are using free heroku dynos.. Doesn't that result in their app sleeping?

> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)

Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?

gsuite, hubspot, github, jira, bitbucket, confluence, codeship, vs code, slack, discord

partially our product botium is open source, thats why we have github and bitbucket.

Slack, Notion, Airtable, Figma, Sentry (maybe), Hubspot

seem to be really unnecessary subscriptions since there are actually better free or one-time payment alternatives.

Thanks for the list. Curious how does Mixplanel compare to Google Analytics? Is it for similar use-case or different?

This is brought home to me whenever I take the time to document a process.

Some of the listed paid services either has free alternatives or can be easily DIY or self hosted on light vm or raspberry PI with fair enough functionality if you do not want to pay for them. Including error monitoring, topic/channel chatroom, git server.

During a gold rush, sell shovels

During a shovel rush, sell shovel making tools

What's the advantage of Robo 3T over Mongo compass?

Airtable and HubSpot would cross over a fair bit, no?

Not even close

Strange. I’ve found that HubSpot’s CRM and salespipe features are pretty good, especially for a small startup. Maybe I am missing something in Airtable.

I’d love to hear more about how they differ

I really don't get why companies use slack and pay 13 a month!!! when you can have gchat for free in your 12 a month. I mean, yes, gchat lacks some features, but for the most part it works.

Please link to all the tools!

i wonder if that leaves them any time to work on their own product

And your hardware took 100's of tools to make. So what?

SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.

Anything is better than nothing, isn't it?

Savings rate goes up with income. On a percentage basis, the 10% are going to be spending more money at restaurants, shops, etc. This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.

trickle down is definitely the solution /s

>This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.

Arguably is the right word.

The global economy is a closed system, so money put anywhere makes its way elsewhere. Spending money in restaurants and shops is most easily visible, but not necessarily any better than other investment.

Even in your example, the 1% putting money in the stock market provides capital for companies as well as income for banks and brokers and finance folk of all sorts (which can then be spent in restaurants and shops). Sure, lower income people have a higher propensity to spend a marginal dollar (because they have to), but that isn't necessarily "better".

What about tax havens and such? As you said, if I put some money into the stock market,

* my broker/bank takes some. If my broker is a public company, some of the money goes to pay operational expenses, and some of the money goes to their shareholders as dividends.

* the stocks I bought go up slightly. They get cheaper capital, and their owners get an unrealized gain.

Schematically, we can assume all bank employees put all their money into the stock market. So the end result is that the benefits accrue to shareholders of public companies, regardless of which stock you buy.

But if money never exits the financial system to go back into the real economy, none of this matters. If a large chunk of the public stock market is held by buy-and-hold investors who just never liquidate their investments nor pay tax, this money will never come to benefit ordinary folks.

Some of it will, by way of pension funds and whatnot. But it's worse than spending it on normal consumption, as I see it.

I'm starting to think we need a 10%er collition.

Our taxes went up under Trump. Healthcare got worse under Obama.

The billionaire class uses the 90 percent to win elections. They have stopped pandering to us.

You're not entirely wrong, but Trump did nothing but pander, and it's arguable that the Democrats biggest problem (apart from the email leaks) was Clinton not pandering enough.

Said another way: Trump worked to earn votes, Clinton just felt like she deserved them.

>Said another way: Trump worked to earn votes, Clinton just felt like she deserved them.

Both candidates felt they deserved votes and deserved to win (Donald Trump no less a narcissist or elitist than Hillary Clinton) and both worked to earn their votes.

However, Donald Trump was willing to make promises to working class people he had no capacity or desire to deliver on, and Hillary Clinton more or less ignored them in favor of pandering to the upper middle class and the left. Neither candidates' strategy says anything about their relative honesty or integrity, one just happened to work better than the other.

In a different universe with slightly different conditions, Clinton might easily have won. Remember, she did literally "earn" more votes than Trump (not that it matters as far as the system is concerned.)

But yes, we get it... "Trump good, Clinton bad." Zing.

If you unite with the 90% instead of getting paid by the 0.1% to exploit them, maybe you can claw back some wealth from the 0.1%

it s redistribution regardless

This “berniespeak” needs to go away. It’s divisive and further entrenched people into polarization. There have been plenty of people from the “bottom 90%” that entered a new income bracket thanks to technology. Let’s celebrate it instead of generalizing it to conform to a politicians ideological battle against the “wealthy”

It seems you are not aware that economic mobility (i.e. ending up in a different income (or wealth) quintile/decile than you were born into is at an all-time low in the United States.

Do you have a source for that? I am aware, according to the Brookings Institute, and world renowned economist Professor Raj Chetty, that it has been relatively flat for decades. Your parents wealth, and where you are born are the two biggest factors for economic mobility. Always has been, most likely always will be, so this isn't necessarily news or novel. So again, not sure divisive rhetoric and entrenching a feeling of class warfare is going to help anything. California, for example, where most people on this site are located and where a large majority of US-based socialism supporters are located, has some of the best mobility in the country. In fact, the single best thing you can do for your economic mobility is to simply move to a higher mobility area (surprise surprise).

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/mobi... http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/move...

> Your parents wealth, and where you are born are the two biggest factors for economic mobility

The entire point of "economic mobility" is as a measure of the extent to which that statement is not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_... (cites several survey papers and 1 or 2 originals)

From a 2015 stanford report (https://web.stanford.edu/~pmitnik/EconomicMobilityintheUnite...):

"Approximately half of parental income advantages are passed on to children. The IGE, when averaged across all levels of parental income, is estimated at 0.52 for men and 0.47 for women. These estimates are at the high end of previous estimates and imply that the United States is very immobile."

Lots more where that came from.

This isn't class warfare. It's a statement of fact that in the USA you are likely to remain in the income bracket you were born into. What do to about that is where "class warfare" begins, if you insist on using that term.

What about services like Uber which are used extensively by lower income people and only exist due to VC subsidy?

Is there evidence that low income people spend less on transportation bc of Uber? It's still hyper expensive compared to public transit and car ownership (if driving daily).

I'm pretty sure he meant that Uber drivers' pay is subsidized through VC funding, not that Uber rides are practical for people with a lower income.

coupled with monetary policies that make overvalued stocks an offer nobody can refuse.

It can be tempting to ride the train of startups whose main innovation is being willing to sell their product at a loss, but doing so hurts other businesses who are unfortunate enough to have to make some money to keep the lights on. Lots of perfectly fine companies have gone out of business because a startup disrupted their industry by setting money on fire.

I still ride the train, but it does give me pause sometimes.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22449561.

No VS Code? Really?

I noticed this:

    LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month) - Finding leads to contact
    SalesQL ($29 / month) - Finding email addresses for leads

I don't know who these people are, but it looks like their business involves spamming people.

I may be lazy but I had to do math to figure out what you spend. Maybe total it? Just as a litmus test.

> we already use 28 different tools regularly totaling $227 / month

My two-person startup only uses one SaaS - Twilio, to send Prometheus alarms to my phone, which costs just a few cents at this volume. We use Freenode IRC instead of Slack, but that barely counts. For meetings we set up a Mumble instance, which is the most reliable setup I've tried. All of our infrastructure is on owned hardware, colocated. For taking notes I use text files.

More to the point of what these folks are using: Mixpanel, Fullstory, Hubspot, SalesQL, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are unethical and you should not use them. It's not "growth hacking", it's spam. You are a spammer. Drift is annoying, no one likes your chat widget. Seems to me like these guys are drinking the kool-aid pretty hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com