Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.

I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK"

But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.

Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.

At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing.

Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.

That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.

IT charging other departments is standard practice at every large company I've been at.

> Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.

That seems like the worst of all worlds from their perspective.

By not paying for it they introduce a massive security concern.

I've seen it too - not uncommon. A frustrating angle is vendor lockin. You are required to only use the internal IT team for everything, even if they're far more expensive and less skilled. They can 'charge' whatever they want, and you're stuck with their skills, prices and timeline. Going outside of that requires many levels of signoffs/approvals, and untold amounts of time making your case. There's value in having some central purchasing process, but when you limit your vendors to one (internal or external) you'll creating a lot more problems that you don't need to have.

Well that leads to shadow IT and upper management throwing a shit fit when we can't fix their system we don't know anything about.

This is really interesting because I was in business school almost thirty years and a cost accounting professor used almost this exact example, only with photocopiers and fax machines to illustrate how you can cost a company to death.

He would have considered that company to be running a perfectly controlled cost experiment. Though it was so perfectly controlled they forgot that humans actually did the work. With cost accounting projects, you pay morale and staffing charges well after the project itself was costed.

I hadn’t thought of that since the late 90s. Good comment but how the heck did I get that old??? :)

I've also seen this exact thing happening about 15 years ago.

Second largest private university of my state, 30000 students. They cut 5 software development positions that were halfway on their rewrite, then purchased a blank slate ERP for 1 million (50% discount, imagine that!), and had spent a few years and around 2-3 million on customising said ERP with consultants by the time I left them.

I guess having only worked in one large organization and only for a couple of years, I had never come across it before. I had even consulted for that company for a few years 10 years prior, and they treated IT a lot differently. That was during a push to insource. So as a consultant, they fired me, years later hired me as an employee, then a new CIO came in and laid off all ICs and replaced us again with consultants.

They even had one of their vendors extend a job offer to me for slightly more than I was making, but I couldn't in good conscience take that offer. Fool me once, and all that.