[slevis]

> All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.

This would only work if the government replacement would be more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French government employs less people for a product of the same quality).

[rtpg]

This one felt obvious, but it feels a bit hard to reason on.

How many sales people does this project need? It’s not zero because grants etc but let’s not kid ourselves.

I think this project will never spend as much money as notion on devs. Like ever.

I will grant that there’s a good idea around “well notion was doing operations for everyone at once so people don’t need as many tech/ops people ”. I’m hopeful that hosted variants pop up to help with this. I’m also hopeful that we can figure out how to make stuff easier to host when high availability is not a requirement.

So maybe we end up net more operators, and less sales people and devs. That’s kind of interesting!

[slevis]

If it feels hard to reason on, it might be a hint... Sales people provide value. Maybe a sales person would have told this project to focus on being an alternative to Notion or Google Docs, as they are different apps/use cases.

The only reason why they might need less developers is because they are a copying an existing product, so less R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than the French Government.