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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

This complaint seems really flawed.

> PagerDuty for example doesn't save people any time, it just sends alerts.

Have you tried building a pagerduty in house? That is literally the time save. The "value of pagerduty" is still measured the same way as any other tool.

Do I build it custom in house? Do I pay someone else a modest amount?

That is what this tool is doing and is geared towards startups who make this decision very regularly. It's got 5 question boxes - of course, there's no way it's going to cover an enterprise consideration that needs 3 analysts to decide whether buying that SAP module is really worth $3mm/year.

Someone made a free tool and you're complaining about it as if it shouldn't exist. Very unsupportive.

Downvoted.

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Perhaps I was overly grumpy. But I get pulled into these discussions a lot. The company now has a very strong newly (2 years) developed "buy not build" mentality.

Half the products we have bought have had full internal teams to support. And many don't suite our needs, so we have enitre development teams building abstractions that are more complex than the product we bought so we can use the product we bought. And some of those abstractions have been in development for 2 years so no one can use the product yet.

My only point is that buying vs building is complex. When you boil that down to a tool that essentially says always buy, it causes a bit of PTSD for me.

Even if it does boil down to that, there might still be value in ranking the savings per service you buy in. Except for a core product, it is almost always going to be the case that buying in is cheaper than building it. However, having limited resources, it's valuable to work out what tools could give you the best value for money, and which others are a more marginal call (given the uncertainty about support work etc.)

Sounds like your company needs to do a little more evaluation and due diligence before buy an off the shelf product. I work at “Megacorp” and it took way less than 2 years to get 20k employees and an equal number of customers onto our off the shelf ticketing platform.

I see this alot too. Products that are forced from above and not used, used under gun point etc. Also products that kinda don't fit in and where it would be just better to build it in house since the subset of functionaliy that is needed is quite small, and so on.

Do you work at Lyft?

> Have you tried building a pagerduty in house?

Yup. Took an afternoon. I was being cheap, so you had to give it the name of the cell phone provider along with the phone number.

Most of what pagerduty does was unnecessary for the use case, so the clone was really simple.

Also, pagerduty is harder to manage than the clone (it just had a single text file with a line per user), again, for that use case.

So, time saved is negative per user. However, the clone probably would have been harder to admin over time. It might have needed about a developer-day per month.

Most enterprise tooling I’ve seen is really about shifting work between cost centers. It’s hard to model that in a simple calculator.

Agreed. Pagerduty and similar notifications systems can be life savers for support people. Especially if they are integrated into a ticketing or event management system.

FWIW, if you’re building a paging system, you’re doing it wrong. There’s open source projects which can do HA paging for you.

It requires a higher touch than pagerduty, but pagerduty isn’t 100% labor free either.

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