Feels Like Saving Money vs Actually Saving Money

blog-saving_money.md

Feels Like Saving Money	Actually Saving Money
Encouraging everyone to work late	Promoting work-life balance to avoid burnout and low morale
Keeping compensation as low as possible	Compensating employees such that they choose to stay, reducing churn
Using the free version of Slack forever	Paying for Slack so that you have a valuable and searchable knowledge base
Building up your engineering team to focus on product development	Building up DevOps and QA orgs within engineering to deliver stable product iterations, faster
Compiling code on local machines	Developing a build farm to shrink compile times
Buying a few cheap servers to run your tools and services	Using a public cloud to provide extensible managed compute and storage
Infrequent team lunches or outings	Frequent team building experiences that contribute to a strong culture
Having an engineer build, package, test, and ship your code	Automating code testing and delivery
Renting a small office space	Renting offices with space for people to get meetings rooms when they need and space to focus without distractions
Choosing the cheaper tier of internet connection speeds for the office	Getting internet fast enough to enable video conferencing and virtual meetings
Packing features into your MVP	Only testing the riskiest assumption about your new product first
Using your engineering team to build your whole tech stack	Purchasing software or services and adopting supported Open Source to focus development on your business's value
Using engineering to work through all issues with your tech stack	Buying support and training to unblock your engineering teams and reduce bugs
Shipping a new feature quickly as possible, testing be damned	A culture of test driven development that keeps customers happier
Using a cheap, unintuitive, and slow work tracker	Buying Jira or another quality work tracker to help teams organize, understand, and prioritize the backlog
Hiring a few managers to cover many people and teams	Hiring more managers to shephard the work of teams and the careers of the team members
Offering meager benefits	Setting up robust healthcare, parental leave, wellness benefits and other perks that your competitors have
Making sure everyone is working on what your expect them to, all the time	Defining expected outcomes and time boxes but letting teams figure out how to achieve them
Policing the office attendance of your employees	Giving your employees freedom to work flexibly, targeting outcomes instead
Directing engineers to do all the requirements gathering	Hiring Product Management to understand customer needs and find product-market fit
Buying as few servers as possible	Buy more servers to throw compute power at time intensive tasks, freeing up engineers
Cancelling the monthly ice cream party	Inexpensive rituals or events that keep everyone positive and having fun