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Comment by SonicScrub | Hacker News Reader

That number doesn't surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the average. I work in mechanical/aerospace engineering for a large company. A lot of the software we use is very specialized and very costly. Here's the yearly costs from the top 4 softwares I use based on a quick google search:

1) $35,000

2) $15,000

3) $10,000

4) $4,500

So I'm costing the company ~$65,000 per year in software licenses alone.

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Even for a typical office worker, based on my experience at a large company, there might be 10 to 20 enterprise apps that include:

  * Tracking work hours
  * Communicating within teams
  * Entering and managing yearly performance reviews
  * Managing IT tickets
  * Catching spyware, phishing, etc.
  * Key and click logging
  * Personality and other screenings for job candidates
  * Health insurance management
  * Jira being used outside of software development
  * Database for archiving HR announcements
  * Password management for the above

In general, the prosperity of a business is a balance of assets and liabilities, and a software purchase is both, since it involves a cost. Managers promote purchases based on a variety of factors relative to the business and their own personal ambitions. There's no magic that makes managers so brilliant in the face of a salesman that they only make beneficial decisions, or that purchases are inherently beneficial, just because the product is software.

Key and click logging?!?!?

> * Key and click logging

What kind of dystopian Corporate hellscapes have you worked in?

This is totally unacceptable. I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement, no matter how benign the intentions of it's implementor. Nothing good can come of it.

Some people do. I still blame the human for the software we have today.

>> I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement

In many cases, you may not even realize it is running.

That just makes it super extra illegal.

IANAL, but my understanding is: - lots of allowances are declared by employers in their handbooks in the US. - unless there are specific union restrictions and/or state provisions, it is probably not illegal

OK, so the USA is mostly a dystopian corporate hellscape. Not that surprising, I guess.

> I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement,

Says the gmail, google, facebook, android user.

Note, this list is based on things I've read about, but I don't actually know what specific security software is typically used by a large employer.

It is a good list, I would add: * Office software (Office365 or G Suite) * Record Management and Workflow * Regulatory Reporting Management * Contract Management * Financial ledger management * Data analytics / business intelligence * Logging and monitoring, log retention * Cloud hosting * Vendor Management * Travel Planning and Expense Management * Cloud Telephony * Mobile Device Management

Keylogging is illegal almost everywhere.

If you suspect that your current or former employer is monitoring people's keystrokes, please contact the appropriate authorities to start a whistleblower process.

Keylogging of any company provided hardware is probably legal as you have no expectation of privacy.

Maybe in your jurisdiction, but certainly not here in Germany.

Says who? I believe that you are mistaken.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-line-of-legality-of-hardwa...

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/08/03/fired-employee-c...

https://www.grossmcginley.com/privacy-rights-in-the-workplac...

Fortunately, much of the world is more enlightened than this, and its legal systems do favour the privacy of employees over the voyeuristic ambitions of bad management under normal circumstances. In many places, the idea that you have no entitlement to personal privacy just because you are working for someone else would be widely derided.

There are often special cases in the laws for when covert monitoring is genuinely justified, for example when there is a reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing by an employee or there are serious security concerns that legitimately require stronger measures. But intrusive surveillance by default, even of employees using company resources on company time, is not permitted in these jurisdictions.

Beautifully said.

I would only add that in the extraordinary case of a legal investigation, there's still no room for vigilante spying by the employer themselves. Presumably, law enforcement would take necessary steps to intervene, not the employer.

Ladies and Gentlemen no fighting!!

Why bother logging keystrokes and clicks, when there is BlueCoat that in real time decrypts, reads, logs/reports, encrypts EVERYTHING that comes in and out of your PC?

I do expect privacy, and find the idea of a middle manager or hr person digging through a employee keylogger output file revolting. It's a truly degenerate state of employer-employee relationship if this is even conceivable.

But software in highly-specialized industries (i.e. needs a lot of functionality but the install base just isn't that big) has always been really expensive. This is pretty much unrelated to the SaaS boom of the past 10-15 years.

I don't think specialized positions have skewed the change much towards increasing SaaS costs.

But there would have to be 5 other workers for every you. I think it’s more likely that the number is around 1 in 200 for most enterprises. And maybe closer to 1 in 1000 for all enterprises combined.

Note: those numbers are pulled out of my ass.

CATIA is a beast of a bill!

And the licensing is not perpetual. Once you stop paying the annual licensing, you are legally obligated to stop sing the software.

That's per license, per employee? Or company-wide license fee? If the latter, you still need to divide by the total number of users of the product.

if GP works in aerospace, those are very likely per-seat license costs.

Completely out of curiousity -- what software costs $35k per seat per year??

VxWorks is about that I believe. When you reach these kinds of price tags though it's hard to evaluate them on a per seat basis, because they tend to come with built-in consultants, etc.

CryEngine 3 is notoriously $1.2 million, but I believe that's a "total cost" rather than a per seat style license.

I heard about 20k per seat for CATIA at a previous employer. 35k wouldn't surprise me if you start adding add-ons (simulation, PDM, etc).

Lots of engineering software does. FPGA toolchains, CAD, simulation. Not uncommon.

Having worked in several related areas, but not very recently, the costs for specialist software packages were certainly much higher than people think of for basic office software, but nowhere near the scale we're talking about here. Have things truly become so crazy that five-figure annual fees for these packages are the norm? A permanent licence used to cost less per user than that! But then I suppose this is the point the article is making.

it is. And especially for SMBs, the cost was way less in the past. Imagine a small mechanical engineering company: 10 years ago they'd have 5 seats of a 5 year old AutoCAD/ProEngineer/Solidworks version, sneakily locking them in but basically no recurring costs. If a new customer needed a new version, they bought one seat for that and kept the old ones, gradually upgrading. Nowadays they pay half the single-seat cost per year because of "continouus updates" (for the UI mainly, so that they can sell trainings)

Several years ago my university was bragging about a $200 million donation the engineering school had received from several companies.

Turned out it was just several hundred seat licenses for a bunch of commercial cad, simulation etc. software, which the companies valued at about $50k/seat.

A very cheap way to donate $200 million.

And to write-off $200.00 million.

Enterprise optimization software costs that. Cplex, gurobi, Xpress.

That is per seat license.

Do you mean that no one else at your company uses any of those 4 softwares?

Not if they're per-seat licenses.

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