Ask HN: What does April 1 cost the tech industry? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does April 1 cost the tech industry?

10 pointsjedberg20 comments

Between the amount of time people spend online talking about it, and interacting with the "jokes", and the development time (hello Google), is there any way we can put an estimate on the cost to the industry?

I know that even when I was at reddit April 1 took at least a few days of planning and coding, and now they start planning well in advance.

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What does going to the bathroom cost the tech industry? Why don't tech workers wear diapers so that roughly 15-20 mins per day is saved, translating to millions of dollars saved per year?

What does eating meals cost the tech industry? What if Google instead spent money investing in Soylent, would the ROI be higher if they simply fed their workers intravenously so that they could save 90 mins?

Not everything is measured in time and dollars and cents. That's the whole reason why the prevailing attitude in Silicon Valley isn't how much time you spend at the office, but that you get your work done. Asking stupid questions like this propagate that same old mentality that spending time on fun tasks "costs" the company.

> Asking stupid questions like this propagate that same old mentality that spending time on fun tasks "costs" the company.

Your own bias is showing here. I didn't say cost was a bad thing -- you just assumed it is.

Lots of good things cost money -- server time, employees, marketing, etc.

I was just interesting in figuring out the cost, not trying to say it is bad. If I wanted to say it was bad I would have used a word like "waste". I did not use that word.

Last year it cost the tech industry $456,345,234.23

What did 2048 cost to the tech industry?

Now this is a question we don't want an answer to.

What does social life cost to Tech industry?

What does social life have to do with anything?

I think it's just pointing out that focusing on any one thing and proclaiming it wastes enormous amounts of resources when viewed at large scale can be a bit silly most of the time. I mean, why stop at April Fool's?

As another person mentioned, what do bathroom breaks cost the industry? How much does people working 40 hour weeks rather than 80 hour weeks cost the industry? How much does a 5 day instead of a 7 day work week cost the industry?

> proclaiming it wastes enormous amounts of resources

I never said that. It's interesting however that at least two people assumed I did (the person you mention talking about bathroom breaks also assumed I meant it was wasteful).

You just had a baby, can't focus on work. Your grandmother died, can't focus on work. Someone stole your credit card, can't focus on work. The IRS is chancing you up for no reason, can't focus on work.

That's what social life got to do with work.

I couldn't find any numbers for April Fools stuff, other than an off-hand estimate of "a few hundred million", which seems about right.

But here's a list of a few other things which cost the U.S. in lost productivity (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/06/h...):

- Heavy drinking, 220 billion/year;

- Smoking, 92 billion/year;

- Commuting, 90 billion/year;

- Changing passwords, 16 billion/year;

- Spam, 21 billion/year;

and my personal favorite,

- Screwing around on the internet when you should be getting work done, of which Reddit is a significant contributor, 134 billion/year.

If I were witty I could have a lot of fun with that last point.

"Cost" is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not a zero-sum game.

For companies with good jokes (Google, Blizzard), April Fool's jokes can be an effective marketing tool. Of course, very, very few internet brands/personalities actually put effort behind jokes.

I'd imagine more productivity was lost on days with absurd news (e.g. Facebook's WhatsApp acquisition)

I wonder how you would calculate the real rate of productivity (because a lot of distractions are probably just the focus of that day, not additionally distracting).

> "Cost" is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not a zero-sum game.

That's fair. However development time doesn't feel like it would be zero sum.

Zero sum implies that the sum is zero. It's entirely possible for the benefits of marketing publicity to outweigh the opportunity cost of development.

I always thought it was an opportunity for cheap marketing..

What does javascript cost the tech industry?

Let's keep this thing lighthearted, I don't want to read about Lovecraftian horrors at 5 o'clock.

I have this strange recurring dream: I'm reading hacker news, and between the headlines about 2048 I see a very disturbing headline that fills me with dread. My heart races as I click, but before the browser can load the page I wake up screaming. The awful headline that disturbs me beyond the worst cyclopean nightmare is "Show HN: cthulhu_fhtagn.js" I can't imagine what horrors it may conceal.

https://github.com/MrJoy/cthulhu

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