Hacker News Reader

Comment by joelhaasnoot | Hacker News Reader

While interesting - there's often a free or opensource alternative for these "generic" SaaS services. You'd probably be spending just as much on this list if you used no SaaS products and hired an engineer to either maintain the open source versions or add similar custom functionality to your product/CMS/dashboard/somewhere. If you hired the engineer, you'd probably get the exact functionality you needed too.

View on HN

We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product.

Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but if you know of one please send them our way! http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/

And yet, you're paying those engineers (and every other employee) to waste their time using N different non-integrated services, all of which change at random whenever a new release is pushed out, disrupting your processes.

I've been involved in this side of a startup 3 different times over a couple decades: IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. At <30 people, all you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.

> IT systems are not a full time job for a startup. They're not even a part time job. They're an every-once-in-a-while type job. All you need is one engineer that can also run a single small internal server. Just one.

Soon enough he or she will have to maintain your mail server, CRM, file server, bug tracker, CI service, backup services etc. and woops, your developer is now a sysadmin.

From experience: That level of maintenance only grows to sysadmin proportions at a scale where you can hire a sysadmin.

These systems largely run themselves, indefinitely.

Not to mention there's a lot of SysAdmins out there that will do the job very well for a lot less than $60K a year. You don't need to hire a SysAdmin who used to work on Google sized infrastructure to run your internal startup's IT.

Salary is just a part of the total cost of an employee. You have to take into account: recruiting, office space, food, medical insurance, payroll tax, stock options, etc. Usually these things will be equivalent to the salary.

Hiring an engineer to work on things that are not strategic to your core products or services seems like a distraction. Engineers also cost a lot more than 55k per year. Even if you could, I can't anyone who would be willing to maintain 30+ open source products as part of their job.

ahh what!!!! did you see the amount of services provided?? could you please support your statement with some logic

So $55k isn't really enough to hire an engineer, but generally speaking many of these services can be setup in a day or two based on open source software or other free tools. I wonder if you made a clear business case based on the features you need, what the result would be. That being said, not having to run it is worth something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com