And now you have to spend money on developers for a system that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”. Does it give you a competitive advantage in the market?

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torginus an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We did the same. We replaced a proprietary build system with our own. The SaaS product we used was super expensive, had a very gougy licensing scheme, had a bunch of features that either didn't work for us, or were so overcomplicated, that we ended up not using them. Before the rewrite, we bypassed like 90% of the internal features, and relied on custom scripts to do everything.

Every SaaS feature in my experience ends up being a mess due to having to support a billion use cases, and figuring it out is more trouble than its worth, might not be able to do what you want, might be buggy.

But even if you do all that stuff, you end up with a mess that can be replaced with 5 lines of shell script. And many more people know shell scripting than figuring out the arcane BS that goes on inside that tool.

It's the eternal lowcode story.

> 'doesn’t make the beer taste better'

I'd say it did. Having a CI/CD pipeline where you don't have to wait for other people's builds, the build logic is identical to what's running on dev PCs, and everything is all-around faster, and more understandable (you can read the whole source) makes testing easier, and surprises less frequent.

All in all, making a hour-long CI/CD turnaround time into 5 minutes or less has been an incredible productivity boost.

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figers 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We already had Developers and the system in place this was a tiny feature in the scheme of things.

Internally it gives us a competitive advantage of the data being in our system from the beginning of the pipeline through the rest of the system where the data would be needed anyway.

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crabmusket 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?

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raw_anon_1111 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.

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9rx 5 hours ago | parent [-]

All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity.

The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary hardware? Instead of 20+ years to produce the legacy human hardware. Meaning, for all intents and purposes, there is no observable limit to how much software machine can create, driving the cost towards zero.

Yeah, sure, the tech still isn't anywhere near capable enough to reproduce something like Salesforce in its entirety. But it is claimed that it is already there for the most trivial of services. Not all SaaS services are Salesforce-like behemoths. Think something more like patio11's bingo card creator. It is conceivable, however, that technology advancement will continue such that someday even Salesforce becomes equally trivial to reproduce.

Maintenance is not a meaningful cost unless you also want to continually have the software do more and more. That could tip the favour towards SaaS — but only if the SaaS service is in alignment with the same future you wish for. If you have to start paying them for bespoke modifications... Have fun with that. You'll be wishing you were paying for maintenance of your own product instead. Especially when said machines drive the cost of that maintenance to near-zero all the same.

	▲	pdimitar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I like your analysis but it seems to imply that at one point we can produce near-infinite amount of software and that this will be welcome. It will not be. Even in this fairly broken state of affairs we are currently in, most non-technical people I spoke to already say that they have too much apps and too much machines with "intelligent" features. And IMO when we have machines that can crank out a complete-but-better Salesforce, our civilization and race would be in an entirely another level and we would see such things as toys. Who needs that antiquated procurement and tracking expenses software, where's our 174th fusion reactor? What is even that in fact? Oh you mean that nail-sized addon we put on our main processing unit? Yeah we're not interested in ancient software history now. We need more juice to capture those gases around Jupiter for the wireless beaming of energy project! Our DAG-based workflow solver and the 5 AIs around it all said we can't do without it. ...So of course nobody wants to pay programmers. We've been viewed as expensive and unnecessary since the dawn of time. A necessary evil, more or less. But your last paragraph captures why many companies need them -- bespoke solutions. You can only add so many cloud services before your normal staff starts making mistakes on an hourly basis because they have to reconcile data between multiple systems whose vendors will always refuse to make integrations. And even if many try to have their cake and eat it too -- i.e. have an IT friend they call only for those bespoke enhancements but only pay them during that time and not every month -- then this service will simply become more boutique and expensive, mostly compensating for the lack of salary. You'd do multiple stints for the year that would cover all your expenses and normal lifestyle, it would just not be through a monthly paycheck. Why? Because I think a lot of people will exit programming. So the law of supply and demand will ultimately triumph. ...Or we get a true general AI and it makes all of this redundant in 5 years.