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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

While one could probably knock a couple thousand bucks off that if one cared to (which is probably penny wise and pound foolish but invariably comes up in HN discussions of hosting costs), the amazing thing is that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are able to use core infrastructure which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

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> which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

To be fair, a lot of maintenance value goes into the software that is never quantified. Broken software breaks hard, not partially, so maintenance is even more crucial.

When a levy breaks people die. Software maintenance and damage is nothing compared to real engineering.

That may be true of web development, but certainly isn't of software as a whole: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

I disagree with the web development comment. What if there was a web interface on top of Therac-25 that had an error in it?

What about the defense industry? People die if you screw up. I mean, people die if you don't, too, but you know what I mean.

It was never definitively proven but poorly designed software was considered to be at the heart of a helicopter crash that killed 25 people including almost all of the UK's top North Ireland intelligence experts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Scotland_RAF_Chinook_crash...

Software controls everything from nuclear power stations to missles to dams to radiation therapy machines (where, again, software killed 3 people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

Proper software engineering is increasingly more important and, I'd posit, likely to become even more important than civil engineering for public safety as time goes on.

> Software maintenance and damage is nothing compared to real engineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft) cost $370 million when an overflow caused a rocket to explode.

I'd imagine there's some mission critical software running nuclear plants, aircraft, cars, etc.

I'll agree mission critical software exists. I however imagine there are far more engineering projects across the planets whose failure result in mass casualties than software. There is a reason actual engineers are legally liable for their work.

Yes there is. It is an older industry. One that existed when Common Law was being formed hundreds of years ago.

Real engineering projects every day use software—I don't think you can realistically draw a line between the two, even if there are different auditing standards.

What is funny is that Github is footing the bill for most package systems, which were likely inspired by ruby gems, yet Github itself was built with Ruby gems. I am pretty sure the hosting costs for homebrew/npm round to nil (I could be wrong).

If you mean the npm homebrew package, then yes. If you mean npm packages, then you might be living under a rock.

Why do you say GitHub is footing the bill? I understand for Homebrew since it uses GitHub repositories, but npm is served via a CouchDB instance which I believe is sponsored by Joyent.

Serious question: muni water dept billing clerks make over $84,000 per year all in?

Once you factor in employer-paid benefits, pension, etc, the employer's cost is something like 140% of the employee's gross pay. This turns the $84,000 into a $60,000 gross salary.

If you include other costs, like the office space and equipment used by the employee, it starts to sound pretty reasonable.

So true! Also, in most organizational structures, every X employees will need one manager, which is also a cost that needs to be factored into the cost of hiring an employee.

An employee costs a lot more than just the cost of their salary.

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