this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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And if the business needs aren't met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.
The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.
I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I'm talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn't leave them for a solution that doesn't freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones... I'm not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that's like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.
I've since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.
The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.
It still worked - you could use the software with occasional hiccups, it's not like there was data loss or anything. It just didn't work WELL.
Ok, well really splitting hairs on what "working well" means but ok. Why do UX designers exist? I mean if you have a bad UI that takes a user 10 min to do something that can be done in 10 seconds in another solution, you lose. Time is money. Anyone who has ever been in magament knows it's all about cost vs output. If a call center employee can handle 2x more cases with another solution due to a better UX, they will move to that.
You are saying efficiency doesn't matter, which is just %100 false. A more efficient solution makes/saves more money. It saves time, which is also money and improves agility of the team. How can you say with a straight face that a business doesn't care about efficiency of it's workers....
Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.
Ugh, wrong again. Time is money. People have limited bandwidth and output, you want to get at much output as you can for the salary spend while realizing each person has a finite output. You keep saying things like "time costs nothing" and "quality doesn't matter" which are just completely wrong and if true would upend the industry.
Also I've been in software for just over 20, the last 4 of those as a CTO. Since you seem to keep bringing up your credentials for some reason.
In one thread someone questioned if I even work in tech. So I started mentioning my experience to back up my claims. My current CTO fully admits that we have to cut corners and deliver features to win customers. That why I work for him. He is honest about it. And he is not new at it either.
As for time is money... take a person working 40 hours a week, and replace thier tool with a cheaper lower quality tool, then tell them to make it work. They start working 44 hours a week. You saved money and got the same result. Awards for you. And a lot of people will do the extra work, because they care about the work. As a bonus, the people who won't work extra leave. Now you have a self selecting group of people who will work longer for the same price. And those tend to be the people who won't leave for various reasons. So now you can even not backfill some of the ones who left, and tell the ones who stayed to cover the slack. Wow, even more money saved. I've seen that happen at a company with billions in revenue and great profits. But the shareholders demand growth, so if they can't sell more, they must cut expenses to grow profits.
Yes, you have to cut certain corners sometimes, that's reality. That does not equate to "quality doesn't matter." That's a major false equivalency.
"As for time is money⦠take a person working 40 hours a week, and replace thier tool with a cheaper lower quality tool, then tell them to make it work. They start working 44 hours a week. You saved money and got the same result. Awards for you."
Yes, except people's hours are much more expensive than licenses. To scale this model as your business grows you would have to hire more and more people, with fully loaded benefits most times, instead of paying for licences to better software that has discounts at larger volumes. If I showed a %25 decrease in a single software spend but a %10 increase in staffing cost I would be crucified. Employees become more expensive the more you have, and software is the exact opposite. Not to mention if you are working 44 hours you now have to pay overtime, and added cost.
"As a bonus, the people who wonβt work extra leave. Now you have a self selecting group of people who will work longer for the same price."
This is just not true. Especially in the economy people will hold onto jobs as long as they can, no matter how rough, they just have less output. Which you could track and manage, but that's yet another expense to manage.
"So now you can even not backfill some of the ones who left, and tell the ones who stayed to cover the slack. "
This would put extra pressure on existing employees, possibly causing them to quit or need overtime which would cost more. Then backfilling an employee if very expensive on the HR and benefits side, that's yet another expense.
"Wow, even more money saved."
I'm not trying to be mean, but a lot of your takes to consider some very basic concepts when it comes to staffing. Like the fact that someone leaving and being replaced the very next day, for the same pay, is actually a large financial drain, it is not break even. Or that fact that software licenses get cheaper as you buy in bulk, where ramping employees to meet scale does not. it becomes more expensive.
I am starting to doubt your credentials. When a salaried employee works 44 hours, it costs the same as when they work 40. And the tougher the economy, the more work you can squeeze out of each person. And no, even in this economy people will leave, not everyone will hang onto thier jobs. And it will be the ones who refuse free overtime that go. This is even amazons well known work model. Only they enforce required firings to take it a step further.
You're doubting my credentials, this is hilarious. Here's a news flash, most of the employees using software at scale, like say Salesforce, are call center hourly employees. If you actually sold SaaS for as long as you said you have you'd know this, because it's part of a savings analysis you do in pitch decks. So ya, I'm starting to doubt your credentials.
Yes yes, not every single person will hang out in their job, but look at the market. It is flooded with talent with no place to go due to everyone having layoffs. You do not have a lot of power as a prospect right now, so people stay put for the most part. Anyone who is in management would realize these things as people start leaving less and you're flooded with applications when you open a position.
Yes, people who refuse the free overtime will go, so you have more people you need to rehire, which is very expensive. Have you ever managed a P&L before?
Amazon does this because they have an infinite supply of applications wating due to them being in the Big 3. Not every company has that pull.
I guess now I know that you just have a super narrow view. Cause no, call centers are not the majority. Not even close. The average tech worker interacts with far more SaaS software products in a day than a call center worker. That however explains your views. Call center software is an outlier. The workers are usually hourly, not salary. And so thier time does matter to the purchaser of the software, and usually it matters a lot. That just isn't the way it is for the rest of the SaaS market.
Oh Jesus.... It's not about how many you interact with it's the scale. A companies tech team is a fraction of the size of the call center.
Call center software is an outlier. Just that massive multiple billion dollar software industry. I mean who even uses Salesforce right?
But you were assuming people weren't hourly. So you were assuming you could have people work forced overtime, skilled workers, with nothing going wrong? Oh boy, bold management tactic.