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by criley2
996 days ago
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I think you must be in some terrible giant corporate entity where everything sucks all the time. I bet you that what I told you about this cost/benefit is being done in every startup that YCombinator funds. I bet you they are all choosing product over staff, because their engineering staff is already their ~largest expense. Their engineers might even cost more than the rest of the company combined including executives. How many companies are choosing SaaS/PaaS/alltheS so their lean team of engineers can scale to millions, instead of hiring a whole team to manage AWS and docker or whatever ops strategy they have. You might think it's a total fantasy and in the places you work it may be, but I've been in countless meetings with countless executives where the Google Sheet is busted out featuring engineering cost and tool cost and where cost/benefit is aggressively decided. Spoiler: it's almost always cheaper to use the tool |
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That is the problem though. It isn't the engineering cost vs the tool cost. It is the engineering cost vs the tool cost PLUS the engineering cost of dealing with the tool once you buy it. Everything you have said so far leads me to believe you are missing this aspect of the cost of buying the tool.
You are right that there is a time and a place for buying over DIY, but in order to make those decisions reliably you need to know how much effort is going to go into dealing with the tool once you buy it. This isn't something you can figure out using Google sheets, because you have to actually evaluate the tool and get a sense of how dangerous the foot guns are.
You're probably right about scaling though. That sounds like an area where the ROI of paying someone else to do it is pretty good.