Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 04:14:03PM +0000, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> yodaiken@fsmlabs.com writes:
> 
> >But it is interesting that you can hire a full time "really good" 
> >programmer for total cost of $50K/year. Salaries are dropping.
> 
> For small and medium companies (such as Siemens...), $50k (or the
> rough aequivalent of EUR 50k) are already good developers salary.

But that $50K is not the whole story.  That's *unburdened*, it doesn't
include any of the associated costs such as benefits, taxes, office space,
expenses, etc.  When I was at SGI I was making around $130K and I was
pretty high up in the salary curve.  At the time, their *average* burdened
cost was $180K/engineer/year.  There is no way that $130K was the average
engineer salary, it was quite a bit lower than that, my guess would be
around 90 or 100.  

You're looking at all this from the typical engineer perspective.
That's not a reasonable perspective at a company of any size.  Management
cares how much the tools cost if they make the engineers significantly
more productive.  The human costs dwarf the tools cost.  So the real
question is how much more do you get out of a team who is using BK than
you would get out of a team who is using CVS or whatever.  If the answer
isn't at least the cost of BK then BK is obviously the wrong choice.
My personal feeling is that the absolute lowest point that would make
sense is a 2x difference.  The reality is that for a company of any
size, it's way bigger than that.  If it wasn't, we'd have no customers.
Times are tough.  People aren't giving us money because they like us, they
do it because the tool gives value in excess of the costs.  One customer,
when asked if we could tell people about their use of BK, refused to let
us because they believe that BK was a competitive advantage, it helped
them get to market faster than anyone else.

Everyone has to decide for themselves what make sense.  I tend to agree
that paying for BK for a small number of seats doesn't make sense,
with a small number of people you can get by easily with CVS or one of
the other free tools.  Eventually that will cause you problems and once
those problems are costing you money, then you may see that spending
that money on BK is actually a net reduction of cost.
-- 
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm