Yep, we haven’t been allowed to hire anyone new on my team in a year. Definitely no headcount for junior engineers. With the cost of licenses for SaaS apps for a single developer my company would rather hire one senior engineer versus 2 juniors.
Now that the in house IT expertise is gone and the data is in closed SaaS you are locked in and it’s time to turn the screws.
I was amazed that anyone believed this at the start, and I'm even more amazed that anyone still believes it.
This industry is so fad driven. When something is the fad in tech it becomes heresy to question it.
I had a similar experience when everyone believed mobile would completely replace desktop/laptop systems. I explained why it wouldn’t, why it was for a different set of use cases, and was kind of scoffed at for that too.
What's happened is that the phone has replaced the PC for casual consumer-level computer use, except maybe high-end gaming.
It can get crazy fast, and once you let stuff into the stack it’s hard to get rid of it. This is particularly true when it becomes part of a process that is in turn tied up with compliance or is used by a lot of people.
Major source of “cost disease” creeping into our industry. I’ve taken to calling the overall phenomenon “low interest rate architecture.”
Okta is not a bad product by any means, and it certainly does work well. But, if SaaS costs are the problem, going from having 18 logins to remember to having a single login while paying for 19 SaaS tools seems like the opposite of a good idea to me.