Hacker News Reader

Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

$5/month isn't $5/month. It's convincing your boss you need $5/month, because they need to convince their boss, which eventually makes its way up the chain to C-levels, who don't know Docker from yesterday's rotting tuna casserole and view eating either that or the $5/month with the same level of disdain.

It isn't about the money, it's about the Mommy-May-I up and down the chain with emails and meetings and careful explanations to skeptical glares. It's a psychological and institutional barrier.

View on HN

If your C suite is personally approving a $5/month charge, your organization is likely no where near the size where a change like this from Docker impacts you.

Or maybe your organization is a public institution, where each penny spent needs to be authorized/accounted for.

> It was revealed on January 22, 2009 that Thain spent $1.22 million of corporate funds in early 2008 to renovate two conference rooms, a reception area, and his office, spending $131,000 for area rugs, $68,000 for an antique credenza, $87,000 for guest chairs, $35,115 for a gold-plated commode on legs, and $1,100 for a wastebasket. Thain subsequently apologized for his lapse in judgment, and reimbursed the company in full for the costs.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain

"Sorry I got caught. I will work harder to hide next time."

Even in a public institution that has never failed an audit, I have trouble believing $5/mo is a hard thing to get. Technically, its $60/year fee because its one of those annual plans. We pay for vultr with no drama.

Worked at a place where everything went through the VP finance and they were making $15M/yr profit. At one point we brought ion a desktop off of the curb to use as our build server. Sure, we got in trouble with ops later but those above us didn't care since it didn't cost us anything.

> If your C suite is personally approving a $5/month charge, your organization is likely no where near the size where a change like this from Docker impacts you.

Or has toxic micromanaged structure. I've had friends who have worked places that would barf over ongoing $60/year software charges, where anything like that would have to go up to C levels and require justification. Luckily never worked at one myself, dodged that particular bullet.

My purchase-approval flow is the same for $1 purchases as it is for $1k purchases. If we hadn't finagled a minor workaround, it would be the same as that required for $5k purchases.

Handling each purchase and documenting it in case we are ever audited requires easily $25-50 of people's time.

If your C suite requires approving a $5/month charge the company has serious issues. This always bugs me about the HN attitude about spending money, but it's really a extremely frugal developer complex. It's $5 a month, you get insane value out of Docker Hub, just pay it. I come from an entrepreneur attitude, my time is my most precious commodity. I don't optimize minor expenses, I optimize the big picture, my time, outcomes, and revenue coming in.

Yeah, when it's $5/mo blocking good utilisation of multiple $150k people, someone doesn't understand priorities.

$5 a month also means consideration is given as part of a contract, and legal will need to review to make sure you aren't granting them patent immunity, etc.

It took 3 months at my old client (fortune 100) to get a signature for an Addendum that would deliver us a service for free in addition to the paid stuff that was already signed.

For me it’s not the c-suite, it’s the admins who make purchases. Or the hassle of maintaining a corporate card.

The headaches to spend $5 cost way more than $5.

>It's convincing your boss you need $5/month, because they need to convince their boss, which eventually makes its way up the chain to C-levels, who don't know Docker from yesterday's rotting tuna casserole and view eating either that or the $5/month with the same level of disdain.

this is where miracle of enterprise sales happen - the $5 subscription can be sold as a $50K+ deal by smooth enterprise sales who will provide the C-exec with the experience making him feel like he did something smart and great for the company.

Just promise to give the exec a keynote time slot where he can describe the ROI of the 50k deal. Helpfully, the vendor will provide an Excel doc that lets you calculate the benefits. You don’t even have to realize them, just aspire to. From there, the C-level gets some fawning press coverage for their LinkedIn profile and a set of job offers at the next-size-up organization where they can also level up on comp...

This "up-and-down chain" should stop pretty quickly at the level where eng mgmt knows loaded costs. It's an eng manager and director's job to compute total-cost-to-execute, and opportunity cost (using loaded-costs for engineer time). They should be able to approve once you've convinced them that it's cheaper to buy than to build.

Engineers can head this off by prepping a total-cost-to-execute analysis for mgmt. This doesn't need to be complicated. It's just some estimates of what's needed and why, and what the alternatives cost. My eng VP used to ask me for these when I'd send up a request. He wanted to know that we thought about total-cost-to-execute. He'd usually only read the exec summary and approve. If these requests are really going that far up the mgmt chain either someone isn't doing their job, or higher level mgmt are micromanagers.

If you work for a company that disconnected from reality you best be looking for a new job. $5 the guy who decides budget should be angry that you didn't come with him directly for such a tiny amount of money.

There is no way you need C-level approval to get a $5 a month subscription.

Start looking. That place is going to fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com