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Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

(allenpike.com)
152 points GavinAnderegg | 1 comments | 01 Jul 25 12:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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lvl155 ◴[03 Jul 25 15:11 UTC] No.44455862[source]▶
Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.
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cmrdporcupine ◴[03 Jul 25 15:12 UTC] No.44455872[source]▶
As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).

But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.

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morkalork ◴[03 Jul 25 15:31 UTC] No.44456091[source]▶
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.
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jermaustin1 ◴[03 Jul 25 16:01 UTC] No.44456416[source]▶
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.

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bongodongobob ◴[03 Jul 25 16:38 UTC] No.44456836[source]▶
IT charging other departments is standard practice at every large company I've been at.
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1. jermaustin1 ◴[04 Jul 25 13:22 UTC] No.44464329[source]▶
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.