[lucideer]

> Sure you have, albeit by another name likely.

> GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.

> I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate.

> Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service.

These are three highly subjective, very unconvincing statements. I use Github, Gitlab, multiple slackbots (some I wrote, some others wrote), managed CI, and a few search services internally in my company every day. I have no confidence that any of them are timesavers in the way that you state.

Slackbots in particular have been shown to use more time than they save (context switching is extremely costly). Github is a source-code host that ads distracting social features, notification queues, etc. all which can add to an employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-host.

I'm not saying they don't save time in aggregate, but there's certainly arguments on either side.

[dijit]

I know a company which I will not name, that was passing source-code around with a USB drive.

Their version of an SVN lock was basically 'who has the USB stick right now'. And while this is an absurd and extreme example (and a true one, crucially) you can't deny that github would have saved those developers countless hours.

Maybe even enough hours to pay a person full time to manage something on-site: but that's why this topic (and the OP's site) is interesting, how do we quantify it?

[jonfw]

You're supposed to compare a service against it's competition, not the least productive thing you could possibly imagine in it's stead.

If you walked into a car dealership and the best thing they could say is "It's WAY better than walking!"- that wouldn't make a great pitch.

[dijit]

This is such a bad faith comment I don't know where to begin.

Of course no reasonable person is saying that you have to compare against the worst thing, that's stupid- I was simply stating that I've seen things that have easily quantifiable returns.

I'm comparing it against the 'nothing' that I would otherwise have.

If you're comparing something then that's yours to compare, and this is a tool for doing that.

if you're not running github or gitlab, what are you running?

Maybe SVN+jira? or gogs? or gitea? what about teamcity?

I'm not going to break down the cost savings and expenses of each of those, I'm just saying we're all already using services that have saved us many hours a week compared to those services not existing in any form.

Its up to you to debate the 'many forms' a service takes, and remember that server hosting and human time is not free, so something self-hosted that requires some hours of time to maintain needs to be cost controlled for.

[mattmanser]

How is it bad faith? You're wrong, he's right.

You can run your own code repository, people did for decades, and took backups home. These days you could just send one to A.N.Y.Other cloud service.

It doesn't take 5 hours per week, and if it takes 5 hours per year I'd be surprised.

[dijit]

It’s bad faith because it speaks to the content of what I said and not the point.

I am one of those people who managed code hosting repositories: but it’s completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost involved at all, and to remove all of the other integrated features too? No. Absurd.

And anyway. The point was making is that we are already paying for services that save us a lot of time- they are of incredible value, and thus universal.

And yes, you might not spend 5hrs a year on _just_ code hosting but code hosting and web view and merge request portals and issue tracking and so on- should those services not be provided somehow (or be provided by something like jira/swarm etc); would easily cost more than that in time.

Hell, even running gitlab is an hour/w job just ensuring that backups are well tested and CI machines are purged, running updates and so on.

It has a low cost, because it’s just one person doing it, but the overall _point_ was that we already have some services that save us time and the parent was not speaking about them.

[lucideer]

> it’s completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost involved at all

Noone in this thread is arguing this.

Your original post made some statements about services saving time, as matter-of-fact statements that are apparently self-evident. I replied saying that these statements are not necessarily self-evident nor always true.

It's possible that Github saves you 5hrs a week. This doesn't mean you can say that this is obvious and universal.

[projektfu]

Before git and mercurial I used CVS. It’s pretty easy to set up a server if you have ssh or telnet access. For personal things I used RCS because it was integrated nicely in emacs. So I think one needs to at least compare it to those.

RCS had almost no configuration required. It just wasn’t easily shareable. So, going to git costs cycles for personal projects with the hope of a return from better management of sets of changes, etc.

[throwaway43234]

> notification queues ... which can add to an employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-host.

If you think your employees would be less productive if they didn't have a queue of work items to address and co-worker comments to look at and respond to... let's just I wouldn't work at your shop. You running a room full of air-gapped code production units or something?

[lucideer]

I think you're oversimplifying. There's a world of difference between "all notification queues decrease productivity" and "some notification queues can decrease productivity in some cases".

Seems something of a divide in interpretation of comments here between people who get subjectivity and people who insist everything is necessarily a binary.

[mattigames]

> all which can add to an employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-host.

Is a bit naive to think those features are the ones distracting the employees, when if you watch a developer at work 98% of the time-wasters are the strongly attractive ones: YouTube, Instagram, etc.

[lucideer]

Dunno where you work, but this doesn't correlate in my workplace.