
Ask HN: What do workplaces pay too much for? - AdamSC1
I&#x27;m currently teaching a class at a local college focused around business systems.<p>I&#x27;m introducing the students to software that &#x27;resolves pain points in business and IT systems&#x27;, but I really wanted to show them that current solutions are non-ideal.<p>With companies so willing to shell out a high amount of money just to get a problem off their plate, they often end up over paying for simple tasks&#x2F;projects.<p>For example, I met one company that paid nearly $500 a month for the equivalent of a Google Alert about their competitor.<p>What are some things your company (or a company you&#x27;re familiar with) pays too much for?
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soulnothing
Professional services or vendor software.

As a professional services developer, a client paid our company several
million to develop custom tooling to monitor their data center. Recently a
load balancer for several million, via a third party vendor to load balance
HTTP requests.

At a prior contract I shared a room with a consulting firm. Slated for two
months. They were paid several hundred thousand to configure Jira, and improve
our agile process.

Anything vendor related. Some teams do not have the structure in place for a
software development team. Or the culture is not right. At that point, is it
better to try and create that culture/team. Or do you pay a bit more and hire
a vendor to create the software for you.

~~~
AdamSC1
So they brought in a professional company to come in configure Jira and show
them how to use it, for several hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Makes you feel like we're all in the wrong line of work...

~~~
soulnothing
If I were thinking about bottom line of my bank account, very much so :). But
I enjoy the challenge of tech.

The company was also converting from a waterfall project style to agile. So
there was definitely teething issues. The professional services deal I
mentioned the sales guy got around 2% of comission.

------
dudul
JIRA. And TBH, I don't even know how much it costs, but it's more than a candy
wrapper and 2 smiles, it's too much.

I'm always baffled to see 10 people startups paying for JIRA. You are 10
people in a freaking open space! Just use a Trello board! You don't need some
fancy workflow that nobody can understand/configure.

My theory is that JIRA does a great job helping you _not_ to focus on the
right things. There is so much fluff that it's very confortable to never
really address real pain points, really define problems/goals/etc. You can't
do that when all you have is a trello board.

~~~
cauterized
Where Jira really shines isn't in moving tickets along a man an board.

It's in supporting the metadata that allows your engineers to quickly refer to
a ticket (by number) and your project manager (or whoever serves that
function) to search and filter the ticket inventory to find what needs their
attention.

I've always worked on small teams. I've tried almost every issue tracker I
could get my hands on. Yes, even Trello (or <shudder> asana) is better than
nothing. But once we've got more than 2 engineers or more than 50 tickets in
our backlog (500-1000 is a pretty normal count for a company that's been
around more than a year or two), I invariably find myself wishing desperately
for this or that feature of Jira.

The problem with Jira is that it's designed to be customized and locked down
for the most rigid and enterprisey of large corporations. The configuration is
insanely complex and has a ridiculous learning curve. And the amount of
process it introduces in its default configuration is indeed way too much for
a small team.

But if you're willing to spend a day or two adjusting it, you can set up a
Trello-like workflow while still gaining features like advanced ticket
searching, automatically reassigning tickets on status change, release
tracking, web hooks for CI and version control, multiple views of the same
data, bulk operations, man an board swim lanes, and other conveniences that
will make your PM and devops people more efficient and less frustrated.

Those things aren't distractions from your users' pain points. They're
features to address your own team's pain points so that they can focus on the
users' pain points - instead of spending their time wading through poorly
organized information and their energy trying to make sense of that
information.

