Sure you have, albeit by another name likely.
GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.
I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate.
Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service.
But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth investing in a service vs hiring someone dedicated and running something yourself.
> Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage?
There’s two points to this argument;
1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me?
2) if I’m an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have to be in the office 9hrs per day.
The first argument is at odds with the notion that most knowledge worker jobs tend to only be around 40% productive.[0]
There’s no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the reasons that percentage is so low, though, is friction. Friction can take many forms such as a bureaucratic process for approvals to change things- all the way to “needing to talk to that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an outage”. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions and there is evidence to suggest that removing these frictions increases productivity, not lessens it. (To a value of 80% which represents a significant increase).
(I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is from a phone)
Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you’re in the office you must be busy- there’s no value to you the employee of the company gets more efficient! Except obviously that’s not true in a more macro sense; I wouldn’t argue that. I would instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with doing actual work and not busywork will make people more engaged and not less.
You wouldn’t feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble your chair each time you wanted to sit in it, it would be tedious and not challenging and certainly cause you to mentally check out.
[0]: https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend...
> GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.
> I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate.
> Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service.
These are three highly subjective, very unconvincing statements. I use Github, Gitlab, multiple slackbots (some I wrote, some others wrote), managed CI, and a few search services internally in my company every day. I have no confidence that any of them are timesavers in the way that you state.
Slackbots in particular have been shown to use more time than they save (context switching is extremely costly). Github is a source-code host that ads distracting social features, notification queues, etc. all which can add to an employees distraction load and decrease productivity when compared to a more basic code-host.
I'm not saying they don't save time in aggregate, but there's certainly arguments on either side.
Their version of an SVN lock was basically 'who has the USB stick right now'. And while this is an absurd and extreme example (and a true one, crucially) you can't deny that github would have saved those developers countless hours.
Maybe even enough hours to pay a person full time to manage something on-site: but that's why this topic (and the OP's site) is interesting, how do we quantify it?
If you walked into a car dealership and the best thing they could say is "It's WAY better than walking!"- that wouldn't make a great pitch.
Of course no reasonable person is saying that you have to compare against the worst thing, that's stupid- I was simply stating that I've seen things that have easily quantifiable returns.
I'm comparing it against the 'nothing' that I would otherwise have.
If you're comparing something then that's yours to compare, and this is a tool for doing that.
if you're not running github or gitlab, what are you running?
Maybe SVN+jira? or gogs? or gitea? what about teamcity?
I'm not going to break down the cost savings and expenses of each of those, I'm just saying we're all already using services that have saved us many hours a week compared to those services not existing in any form.
Its up to you to debate the 'many forms' a service takes, and remember that server hosting and human time is not free, so something self-hosted that requires some hours of time to maintain needs to be cost controlled for.
You can run your own code repository, people did for decades, and took backups home. These days you could just send one to A.N.Y.Other cloud service.
It doesn't take 5 hours per week, and if it takes 5 hours per year I'd be surprised.
I am one of those people who managed code hosting repositories: but it’s completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost involved at all, and to remove all of the other integrated features too? No. Absurd.
And anyway. The point was making is that we are already paying for services that save us a lot of time- they are of incredible value, and thus universal.
And yes, you might not spend 5hrs a year on _just_ code hosting but code hosting and web view and merge request portals and issue tracking and so on- should those services not be provided somehow (or be provided by something like jira/swarm etc); would easily cost more than that in time.
Hell, even running gitlab is an hour/w job just ensuring that backups are well tested and CI machines are purged, running updates and so on.
It has a low cost, because it’s just one person doing it, but the overall _point_ was that we already have some services that save us time and the parent was not speaking about them.
Noone in this thread is arguing this.
Your original post made some statements about services saving time, as matter-of-fact statements that are apparently self-evident. I replied saying that these statements are not necessarily self-evident nor always true.
It's possible that Github saves you 5hrs a week. This doesn't mean you can say that this is obvious and universal.
I’m saying that services that are like GitHub are ubiquitous because they save time, easily 5hrs a week- and creating them anew would cost more than those services do if you buy them as a user (gitlab enterprise or github “pro”)
You can argue the minutia of “this service” vs “that service” but at the end of the day those suite of things save time.
> I’m saying that services that are like GitHub are ubiquitous because they save time
Popular services are ubiquitous for many reasons, some of them based on actual value, some of them based on perceived value, and others based on things orthogonal to day-to-day value like organisational inertia, aspects of network effects, etc. They may save time for you. Others may have chosen the service for different reasons: either wise or ill-advised.
> easily 5hrs a week
Subjective. But also, more importantly, subject to error based on your metrics. How have you quantified time saved by Github?
> creating them anew would cost more than those services do if you buy them as a user (gitlab enterprise or github “pro”)
This is, I think, where you're missing my point. Of course creating them anew would cost more than those services do. That's not the question being asked here though. What's being discussed is whether using Github will save you time over not-using Github.
Not using Github does not necessarily mean maintaining an equivalent service itself, because that presupposes that the features provided by Github save you time as is. The only reason you would host an equivalent service yourself is if they definitely do, which isn't a certainty.
.. satire?
What do you propose as an alternative to github/gitlab/code hosting?
I can break down reasons for github/gitlab as a service being aggressive value, however I would be shot down with "but that's not reality, you should compare competitors!" as it was in this comment chain... So I'd love for you to pontificate on the point you're making.
RCS had almost no configuration required. It just wasn’t easily shareable. So, going to git costs cycles for personal projects with the hope of a return from better management of sets of changes, etc.
If you think your employees would be less productive if they didn't have a queue of work items to address and co-worker comments to look at and respond to... let's just I wouldn't work at your shop. You running a room full of air-gapped code production units or something?
Seems something of a divide in interpretation of comments here between people who get subjectivity and people who insist everything is necessarily a binary.
Is a bit naive to think those features are the ones distracting the employees, when if you watch a developer at work 98% of the time-wasters are the strongly attractive ones: YouTube, Instagram, etc.
Github is, primarily, managed source code hosting- but it has more components, so lets break them out:
1: Source code hosting
2: Web view
3: Issue tracking
4: Project management tracking
5: Search
6: Authentication and identity (oauth2 and "applications")
7: Documentation rendering
8: Web hosting (a-la github pages)
9: CI pipeline (github actions)
SVN replaces point 1, and poorly. How many hours do you need to manage an SVN server? Very few I would wager but it at least behooves to ask the question. And it certainly behooves to understand that you're not replacing 1:1; you're replacing many things with one, and managing the above yourself can be done cheaper, but poorer, so that "poor" imitation could cost more time for using it too.
It's a very nuanced topic but an interesting one, and reductionist questions like this are not helpful.
If you averaged the time out, it may not have hit the five hour per week mark, but it combined with other time savers (linking Git directly with the issue tracker for example instead of having to figure out how to cross reference them) easily did/does.
The claim was 5 hours per employee per week. I found that it took far less than 50 hours a week when working at a 10 person company. And if it did, I'd question the competence of whoever was doing that maintenance.
I'd pin it at closer to 3 or 4 minutes per employee per week, with maybe 8 hours of setup once. That's still a bunch of work, but it's a whole different ballgame.
Take a management class or three, it'll save you a lot of money.
Seriously. If that needs to figure into the evaluation of the service, something is deeply broken in the culture of your company. Not because employees goof off - it happens, and only some amount of that is under your control. But because you assume that given any chance, people would goof off more.
That's far from normal. It usually happens if employees feel mistreated, or if they're not given a fair share of the value they create. Possibly if they're already halfway to leaving.
More likely, there's other work that the employee could be doing that will help your company grow
1. I’ve yet to find a service that saves 5 hours per week per employee. How do I estimate the actual savings in time?
2. Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage?
3. How much does this increase or decrease my personal time required as supervisor?
4. From a financial point of view, I’m still paying the employee and the service, so either I need enough services and time savings that I can eliminate a job, or the service has to have positive ROI of its own.
And probably many more. I often receive proposals of this type, that I could be “saving” so much by buying something. The money goes out up front, the savings are supposed to trickle back in these hard to quantify and use ways.