49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour.
29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours
If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself.
This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.
Gotta love HN math. Calculations to two decimal places, starting with a number plucked from the high end of a distribution with standard deviation of at least 100K.
What a dev costs is not the same as what an advertised salary for a dev is. This is closer to the middle of the distribution for dev costs in the US.
So annually you have to spend < 3*19 = 57 hours on your custom built source control and CI to come out on top.
Can’t be done outside of “we hired the OG devs of Gitlab/hub/etc”
we run ghe at work and I know we spend 8 hours 4+ times a year for a test upgrade and then an upgrade from an eng that makes above either of your estimates in salary alone.
None of this includes all the work we're not doing to build new integrations or features in the ci system that we get for pay for the product. But we're not a scrappy startup either. We're paying down much of the tech debt from being a scrappy startup, it's not been cheap.
I currently cost more like 80K in euro's if I reason from my employer's side. So tell me, how are you getting to the 250K exactly?
Europe exists as well and even in the US there are enough companies that don't pay FAANG salaries.
I'll be honest, it does sometimes blow my mind to see how low salaries are over there when I look at job postings and Who's Hiring and the like. I'm jealous of a lot of things Europeans take for granted, but it's wild to me to see senior positions in major European capitals paying the amount that I made two years out of a bootcamp.
There's a lot of companies paying 2/3rds of that cash.
Then there's the bad ones, that are still trying to pay half. Seriously. They're not places you even realize exist, and if you went in for an interview you'd instantly sense you're not where you want to be. Places where you watch managers basically bully interviewees to look for immediate subservience, because they want to ensure they'll "yessir" without hesitation. These places absolutely exist. In all of those markets. I've seen quite a number of them.
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I know, this isn't what we all try to aspire to here, but I say this as someone with far too much experience with Boston (very specifically), Denver and Austin over the past 20+ years. I've had the "good but not amazing" and many "bad" companies as clients of mine. I've talked to their staff. I've done my damnedest to ensure the good eggs know where they stand in the market, and help them move on if they wanted to.
HN very much looks at 75th percentile on up. But once you go down the ladder in the compensation offered, you'll encounter a ton of people where $170-200K salary or salary+bonus would be a 20-30% bump in their comp in those markets. Then you get to the bad places, where they're legit making half and feel thankful for it.
in the US
in specific rich cities in California, New York, Texas, Washington, and Colorado
at a handful of tech companies which are currently bedevilled by lay-offs
averaged across all roles
GitLab doesn't have regional pricing.
Maybe something like gitea+teamcity solution is better and cheaper and has less opportunity cost?
I like gitlab, but it feels they have been walking in the wrong direction for many many years and the consequences are starting to pile up.
Though I often don't take my own advice, I try to ask is what I'm about to build core to our ROI/product, is there an existing solution that gets us 80% there, and yes, what is the cost.
If it is not core to the business, won't drive revenue, and cost are not outrageous, which is a company by company truth, then I much prefer to spend X time building new product than recreating an existing product/tool.
One final point - don't forget to consider the maintenance costs, which in the long term often greater then the initial investment. If your CI goes down, you just blew away and savings you were planning on.
In general I agree with you off-the-shelf is usually better but sometimes a custom tailored solution rather than a generic system can be better.
And the cost of that has to be compared to cost of gitlab subscription and other gitlab related headaches.
Average salary where I live is $21k/yr with average devs taking maybe $25-40k/yr. Top jobs being ~$65k
