Ask HN: What do workplaces pay too much for?
I'm currently teaching a class at a local college focused around business systems.
I'm introducing the students to software that 'resolves pain points in business and IT systems', but I really wanted to show them that current solutions are non-ideal.
With companies so willing to shell out a high amount of money just to get a problem off their plate, they often end up over paying for simple tasks/projects.
For example, I met one company that paid nearly $500 a month for the equivalent of a Google Alert about their competitor.
What are some things your company (or a company you're familiar with) pays too much for?
6 comments
[ 8.5 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadI'm always baffled to see 10 people startups paying for JIRA. You are 10 people in a freaking open space! Just use a Trello board! You don't need some fancy workflow that nobody can understand/configure.
My theory is that JIRA does a great job helping you not to focus on the right things. There is so much fluff that it's very confortable to never really address real pain points, really define problems/goals/etc. You can't do that when all you have is a trello board.
You're right though, easier ways to meet this pain point!
It's in supporting the metadata that allows your engineers to quickly refer to a ticket (by number) and your project manager (or whoever serves that function) to search and filter the ticket inventory to find what needs their attention.
I've always worked on small teams. I've tried almost every issue tracker I could get my hands on. Yes, even Trello (or <shudder> asana) is better than nothing. But once we've got more than 2 engineers or more than 50 tickets in our backlog (500-1000 is a pretty normal count for a company that's been around more than a year or two), I invariably find myself wishing desperately for this or that feature of Jira.
The problem with Jira is that it's designed to be customized and locked down for the most rigid and enterprisey of large corporations. The configuration is insanely complex and has a ridiculous learning curve. And the amount of process it introduces in its default configuration is indeed way too much for a small team.
But if you're willing to spend a day or two adjusting it, you can set up a Trello-like workflow while still gaining features like advanced ticket searching, automatically reassigning tickets on status change, release tracking, web hooks for CI and version control, multiple views of the same data, bulk operations, man an board swim lanes, and other conveniences that will make your PM and devops people more efficient and less frustrated.
Those things aren't distractions from your users' pain points. They're features to address your own team's pain points so that they can focus on the users' pain points - instead of spending their time wading through poorly organized information and their energy trying to make sense of that information.
As a professional services developer, a client paid our company several million to develop custom tooling to monitor their data center. Recently a load balancer for several million, via a third party vendor to load balance HTTP requests.
At a prior contract I shared a room with a consulting firm. Slated for two months. They were paid several hundred thousand to configure Jira, and improve our agile process.
Anything vendor related. Some teams do not have the structure in place for a software development team. Or the culture is not right. At that point, is it better to try and create that culture/team. Or do you pay a bit more and hire a vendor to create the software for you.
Makes you feel like we're all in the wrong line of work...
The company was also converting from a waterfall project style to agile. So there was definitely teething issues. The professional services deal I mentioned the sales guy got around 2% of comission.