Ask HN: What does your company spend too much money on? - throwawayforX
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The_DaveG
Sometimes the biggest waste of money is being cheap: Penny Smart, Dollar Dumb.

Like a company that will spend a lot of money on hiring people, but won't give
them a decent laptop because they had a different one from 7 years ago. Or
refuses to give someone the training that they need.

Or a company that shuts the heat or AC off exactly at 5pm to save a couple of
bucks on electric cost (and chase all their people out).

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muzani
Keyboards, mouse, monitor too. They're dirt cheap compared to recruiting,
improve productivity and the likelihood that someone is going to want to work
for that company.

But IMO shutting the AC off at 5 PM might actually be good company culture to
encourage everyone to get everything done by then and go home.

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The_DaveG
Yup, I've brought my own stuff in before, because it's what I wanted. Happy
that I now work at a place that isn't like that!

I could see what you mean by that, but in this instance, the owner was a
notorious penny pincher. It was because he was cheap. This was also back in
the early 2000's when the company culture was that of drinking during work on
Fridays. You may think it was the 80's... everyone called the place "The
Country Club"

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bartozone
I once worked for a company that didn't track their expenses too well, and we
found out the maid was getting over 10K a month for working 2 hours 5 days a
week. The maid.

I did the hourly break down and realized she was the highest paid person in
the company (CEO included) for about a year and a half.

I couldn't believe it.

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ryanx435
could be hush money for some kind of sexual thing

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RickS
It's unproductive to make suggestions like this completely absent evidence of
any sort.

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bdcravens
The specific allegation to be sure, but in general, an obscenely overpaid
employee can reveal something more going on (say an unauthorized consultant)

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rwnspace
There's also a pun about maids and laundry somewhere in there.

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CyberFonic
Managers hiring more managers.

Once worked for a company where the founder had an idea for a new software
product. He hired a friend to be the product manager who then hired a project
manager to manage a team of three programmers and two architects who didn't
agree on anything. When the project failed to meet a founder set deadline, the
project manager was fired and a new one hired. In the space of 18 months the
company went through 5 project managers. At that point I resigned, couldn't
handle the constant changes that each project manager brought in. I met the
product manager at a conference 5 years later and they had only just released
the "product".

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sh87
Yeah. Managers.

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ux4
Coffee.

Now before you get upset, my company spends thousands of dollars a month on
shitty coffee beans, rented coffee machines, and a monthly cleaning service
for those machines. They purchase Peet's coffee which is expensive but tastes
like brewed cigarette butts and brew it in standard drip coffee machines that
cost the equivalent of 3 new coffee machines each month. Most of the employees
don't even drink the coffee, they brought their own Keurig machine and brew
their own pods instead.

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gt_
Sounds like a worthy point to raise. Peet’s is some truly awful stuff. When I
think of it, my mind conjures images of “peat” the fertile gardening soil made
from decayed vegetation.

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taheca
It truly is the worst of the coffee offerings out here. When I see people in
SF walking around with Peet's I always think "why?", you are literally
surrounded by some of the best coffee in the world.... hell even Nestle Sell
out Blue Bottle would be better than Peet's

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cdevs
Not paying attention to details in general, I can spend what I want on aws, I
have told them I can save them thousands and no one cares until we have a bad
month. On top of that 2 times a year we lose a service because a bill wasn't
paid , when does it kick in that there is a problem?

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jerf
Make them an offer: You'll spend your time out of normal office hours to cut
down the AWS expense. Add half to your salary, they can keep the other half.

And suddenly, they'll care a lot.

We're having some struggles with this at my workplace too. Engineers and even
some management I'm finding rather cavalier about cloud spends. I wish they'd
be as cavalier about my salary... "yeah, sure, you want another $200K/year, no
sweat, whatevs dude." You don't mind if I click a button and accidentally
spend $2K/month on a system that I'm using 1% of, but when it's in _my_ favor
suddenly we can't do that.

(I'm not responsible for much in the cloud yet, but I do try to be
responsible, even if for now it doesn't seem to benefit anybody. I'm sure at
some point someone is going to raise hell about this and I'm not planning on
being in the line of fire.)

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m_fayer
In Germany there's lots of paranoia, some justified and some not, about the
NSA/Patriot act/etc. that leads to complete avoidance of American service
providers and clouds. I've seen German companies at small scale doing mundane
things running everything under the sun themselves like it's 1999, and with
security infrastructure and procedures fit for a bank, protecting a small
amount of uninteresting data.

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dijit
I would not call that a waste. The US has one of the most hostile governments
regarding tech. It may feel wasteful now but being self-reliant (and having
the knowledge of how to be) frees those companies enormously.

And, yeah. Monopoly positions are toxic too. So curbing that is also of value
not only to Germans but to all foreign states.

~~~
m_fayer
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

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skate22
Having developers attend meetings they dont need to be at

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megaman22
Interns. We have a tendency to hire college kids as testers, qas, and
marketing interns, and we almost always end up spending a lot of time and
effort onboarding them, and managing them, and training them; then they either
never become useful, or leave for something else.

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barry0079
I don't see why they wouldn't leave. They will have the experience to earn
much more.

~~~
megaman22
Unless it's being done as charity, it's pretty pointless, for us. It just
creates more work that detracts from revenue generating activity, but the boss
likes having them around for some reason.

~~~
JBlue42
What incentives are offered so they don't leave?

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tabtab
Incompetent managers who waste time, money, and non-grey-hair. Stuff-waste
cannot compete with bad-behavior-caused waste.

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muzani
I see a lot of early stage companies spending way too much on marketing before
they have a product to launch.

Because the marketing team is ready to boom it, the product has to even more
stable than it otherwise would be. So ironically, they keep adding more
features and launch too slowly. Or they could have some fixed launch date and
developers end up hacking in buggy features to meet a deadline. The pressure
costs a lot more in terms of engineering as well.

I've seen some budget around $50k marketing to get around 1,000 downloads.

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nathantone
meetings!

is there an ADP/Google Cal integration that tells you how much each meeting
costs the company? (by multiplying effective hourly rate * meeting length for
a in attendee)

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davewasthere
I wrote a quick little web page that I'd fire up each meeting. # employees *
average hourly salary * time taken in meeting... and at the end of the meeting
I'd say how much that meeting cost.

I wasn't popular. :)

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cloverich
Do you still have this code? I want to be unpopular too!

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mattbgates
Honestly? Bringing everyone into the office. I got hired as a remote worker.
About a year and a half later, they gave everyone an option: come into the
office or get laid off.

They claimed we needed better communication.

Only me and one other person moved across the country. About 150 people were
let go.

Got to the office.. communication still isn't that great.. it is actually
about what it was before I moved, but now we talk through Slack instead of
email and everyone sits a cubicle next to each other, so yeah, great
communication.

As for why they spent too much money? I mean, it worked out great for me: I
went from having no benefits, no bonuses, no 401k, no health insurance, no
vacation time, a lower salary, and I worked from home.

Moving me into an office gave me PTO (Paid Time Off), sick days, floating
holidays, health insurance, 401k, bonuses, a higher salary, and of course, the
benefits of working in an office, such as parties and all that company stuff.
And finally, this year, I got a new laptop!

But then again.. maybe I was a good investment? Been with the company for 5
years now.

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bdcravens
Unoptimized cloud resources (not buying reserved capacity, instances that were
spun up for a test and never spun down etc)

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b3lvedere
Trying to take over other companies.

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brian_spiering
According to the court, Uber spends too much on hush money.

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tmaly
people, we could be doing better with more process and better communication.
Instead of automating things, we are hiring people to do manual work.

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quickthrower2
My Salary

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milkytron
Technology trainings that are irrelevant to our products.

I understand it's good to train employees to give them more value, but the
things their being trained on aren't relevant to our work, and then quit to
use those skills at a competitor.

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he0001
Honestly? Microsoft products...

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hkmurakami
Our lawyers.

