[phkahler]

No, total cost would be a better measure since there is no per-person cost to the SaaS provider.

If you have 10,000 employees that's $100M per year in expenses. If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

[owenmarshall]

> If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

This is the kind of hubris I come to this site for.

[adwf]

Hubris is half of software development ;)

[adjkant]

Is the other half the hole of legacy support you dig yourself into supporting the bad decisions and naive assumptions you made driving with that hubris?

[WoahNoun]

Nah that's when you leave the company and leave some intern to clean it up so they can develop their own sense of hubris over your bad decisions. And the cycle repeats.

[nradov]

Read up on the history Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3). The team worked for 7 years and although they achieved some technical goals they never managed to deliver a working payroll system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...

Payroll is harder than it looks due to all the edge cases. For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates?

[a1369209993]

> For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates?

By issuing a error and demanding that a human deal with it. Obviously.

[nradov]

Surely you jest? If that was a serious comment then you obviously have no understanding of the business and legal requirements for payroll systems.

[a1369209993]

If you're legally required do your payroll with a buggy computer system rather than manually (and not even "this specific buggy computer that we gave you", just any old buggy piece of crap), then, uh, I don't really know what to say to that. My condolences, I guess?

If you mean it's impractical and error-prone to do payroll manually, well that's the point of automating >99.999% of it. For the remaining <0.001%, someone is going to have decide how to deal with it, and I'm sceptical that a programmer seven years ago will know better than a lawyer today what the legal requirements today are.

[nradov]

The level of aggressive ignorance in HN comments can be quite shocking. There is no legal requirement to use any particular payroll system. The payroll rules are written by domain experts including lawyers and others, and encoded into rules engines.

[SPBS]

Well, how do existing manual systems deal with it? Why not just make do with partial automation and fall back on the existing methods for those thorny legal edge cases?

[nradov]

Except for the smallest local businesses, there is literally no such thing as existing manual systems anymore. It's simply not possible to do manual payroll while maintaining compliance with laws, regulations, civil orders, labor contracts, and company policies. Every significant enterprise has either built up a custom automated system over decades, or has customized a commercial ERP payroll module, or outsourced the entire thing to a specialized payroll company.

You could argue that payroll shouldn't be so complex but that's the reality of it today.

[fludlight]

Rolling your own payroll is about as good an idea as rolling your own crypto.

[say_it_as_it_is]

However, if you roll your own crypto payroll, the risk of one project perfectly offsets that of the other. It's a perfect hedge.

[wglb]

Ah, but what if they add rather than cancel?

[kaetemi]

Two negatives make a positive, right?

[rodgerd]

It depends whether payroll theft is part of your business model, or something you're trying to avoid.

[walshemj]

One large company (170k employees) I worked at switched from an in house payroll system to an external month.

Second month was a disaster in the end they had to physically cut the tape on the last remaining partially destroyed copy - about 20% got paid on time.

[fludlight]

Switching a large enterprise software system is almost as time consuming, expensive, and error prone as developing a replacement in-house. You would have experienced substantial problems even if it was in-house -> in-house-rewrite or external->in-house or external-a -> external-b.

[tehlike]

If rolling your own crypto, you mean cryptocoin, that sounds like a great idea to increase wealth :)

[cercatrova]

Cryptography not cryptocurrency.

[tehlike]

That was the joke.

[_jal]

We wanted to build our own payroll system, but engineering is too busy milking the cows to restock the fridge to learn the tax code for multiple countries.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Has anyone thought about asking engineering to implement or build an interface for someone else (business side?) to manage country level differences in taxes?

[thestepafter]

I would be interested in engineering something like this, my email is in my profile if you want to share more.