| I agree with you completely. As engineers, our instinct is to build things. Business discipline requires focusing on profitable uses of time. It's highly unlikely that building expense tracking software was the best use of time for the original author. He writes that thinking about the POTENTIAL future costs of expense tracking software ($1000/year) upset him. If one realistically considers the costs to "roll your own" in terms of time, maintenance overhead, hosting & administrative cost, and opportunity cost the obvious conclusion is that this is not a good use of time and energy. If Tom had instead spent that time fixing a bug, doing hard sales/marketing work it would have been worth much more to him. No for us, engineers, doing hard, repetitive work is the real discipline. Automating things and finding systems that can be made more efficient is the easy work. Picking up a phone and making a sales call, trying to improve ad words advertising....these are things that are likely more valuable than rolling your own expenses email system. |