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Comment by apercu | Hacker News Reader

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass.

AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.

AI will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than you were.

The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as "ok" to be shitty now.

Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.

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> The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid.

So true.

Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but then were reporting record profits which means they were lying.

It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for living wages and better work conditions.

Trump won the popular vote. I don't trust the billionaires, but I'm not sure my coworkers are much better on average tbh.

You must be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, because that's what I got called for saying this since then. /s

> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.

There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why.

The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.

The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are in the six or even seven figure range.

How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?

I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to square one and try again.

The last couple of companies I worked for were only still in business because they avoided the cloud completely, and their competitors didn't. Paying 4x the cost for something isn't a competitive advantage unless the capabilities the cloud provides are significant. While they are nice, unless you are a very specific type of business, they aren't going to make up for the increased costs.

In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...

What sector of the Econ were those failures in?

Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app.

It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.

If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.

When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.

For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.

It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.

Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.

It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.

What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.

> But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine

These are things you still need to think about and setup in the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's less work compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers. Except for the backups, that's the only solid convenience win for the cloud in my experience.

Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies.

> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale

What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.

Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10 months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.

The only thing that cloud brought is the possibility to spend less for smart people/companies that have the right workload. At the (hidden) expenses of the other clients that are not so smart or don't actually need that elasticity. Yes, there are economies of scale at AWS but in the end there is fixed capacity that either gets used or not.

Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well below half just to break even. But you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests. So at small scale there’s zero benefit from dynamic loads.

> you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests

You don’t always need a server, you could also just go serverless, get charged 10x while you make your architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.

Yea, just don’t ask what’s listening for those requests.

please bro just one more SQS queue bro I swear bro just one more please bro

There's a lot of ignorance in yours as well, because the actual point of cloud isn't to be cheaper (and it's not), it's to be standardized in terms of workflows. AWS or Azure or whoever will cost more in the long run, their entire business model is built on top of making it impossible to migrate and then jacking up prices. Of course OAI and Anthropic will become more expensive once enough people get locked into their API, it's how it works.

The more practical day to day reason for the top management to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a more general skillset which they can hire from at any point and fire any of their team without a second thought if they idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.

It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power, as always. The cost doesn't even matter.

It makes workers easier to replace, but it also makes switching between companies easier.

Cool story bro.

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