Ask HN: What does your company spend too much money on?

Sometimes the biggest waste of money is being cheap: Penny Smart, Dollar Dumb.

Like a company that will spend a lot of money on hiring people, but won't give them a decent laptop because they had a different one from 7 years ago. Or refuses to give someone the training that they need.

Or a company that shuts the heat or AC off exactly at 5pm to save a couple of bucks on electric cost (and chase all their people out).

I once worked for a company that didn't track their expenses too well, and we found out the maid was getting over 10K a month for working 2 hours 5 days a week. The maid.

I did the hourly break down and realized she was the highest paid person in the company (CEO included) for about a year and a half.

I couldn't believe it.

Managers hiring more managers.

Once worked for a company where the founder had an idea for a new software product. He hired a friend to be the product manager who then hired a project manager to manage a team of three programmers and two architects who didn't agree on anything. When the project failed to meet a founder set deadline, the project manager was fired and a new one hired. In the space of 18 months the company went through 5 project managers. At that point I resigned, couldn't handle the constant changes that each project manager brought in. I met the product manager at a conference 5 years later and they had only just released the "product".

Coffee.

Now before you get upset, my company spends thousands of dollars a month on shitty coffee beans, rented coffee machines, and a monthly cleaning service for those machines. They purchase Peet's coffee which is expensive but tastes like brewed cigarette butts and brew it in standard drip coffee machines that cost the equivalent of 3 new coffee machines each month. Most of the employees don't even drink the coffee, they brought their own Keurig machine and brew their own pods instead.

Not paying attention to details in general, I can spend what I want on aws, I have told them I can save them thousands and no one cares until we have a bad month. On top of that 2 times a year we lose a service because a bill wasn't paid , when does it kick in that there is a problem?

In Germany there's lots of paranoia, some justified and some not, about the NSA/Patriot act/etc. that leads to complete avoidance of American service providers and clouds. I've seen German companies at small scale doing mundane things running everything under the sun themselves like it's 1999, and with security infrastructure and procedures fit for a bank, protecting a small amount of uninteresting data.

Having developers attend meetings they dont need to be at

Interns. We have a tendency to hire college kids as testers, qas, and marketing interns, and we almost always end up spending a lot of time and effort onboarding them, and managing them, and training them; then they either never become useful, or leave for something else.

Incompetent managers who waste time, money, and non-grey-hair. Stuff-waste cannot compete with bad-behavior-caused waste.

I see a lot of early stage companies spending way too much on marketing before they have a product to launch.

Because the marketing team is ready to boom it, the product has to even more stable than it otherwise would be. So ironically, they keep adding more features and launch too slowly. Or they could have some fixed launch date and developers end up hacking in buggy features to meet a deadline. The pressure costs a lot more in terms of engineering as well.

I've seen some budget around $50k marketing to get around 1,000 downloads.

meetings!

is there an ADP/Google Cal integration that tells you how much each meeting costs the company? (by multiplying effective hourly rate * meeting length for a in attendee)

Honestly? Bringing everyone into the office. I got hired as a remote worker. About a year and a half later, they gave everyone an option: come into the office or get laid off.

They claimed we needed better communication.

Only me and one other person moved across the country. About 150 people were let go.

Got to the office.. communication still isn't that great.. it is actually about what it was before I moved, but now we talk through Slack instead of email and everyone sits a cubicle next to each other, so yeah, great communication.

As for why they spent too much money? I mean, it worked out great for me: I went from having no benefits, no bonuses, no 401k, no health insurance, no vacation time, a lower salary, and I worked from home.

Moving me into an office gave me PTO (Paid Time Off), sick days, floating holidays, health insurance, 401k, bonuses, a higher salary, and of course, the benefits of working in an office, such as parties and all that company stuff. And finally, this year, I got a new laptop!

But then again.. maybe I was a good investment? Been with the company for 5 years now.

Unoptimized cloud resources (not buying reserved capacity, instances that were spun up for a test and never spun down etc)

Trying to take over other companies.

According to the court, Uber spends too much on hush money.

people, we could be doing better with more process and better communication. Instead of automating things, we are hiring people to do manual work.

My Salary

Technology trainings that are irrelevant to our products.

I understand it's good to train employees to give them more value, but the things their being trained on aren't relevant to our work, and then quit to use those skills at a competitor.

Honestly? Microsoft products...

Our lawyers.