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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   26666 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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I think I am lacking some clarity. When you make the decision to keep them on and train them as you migrate their infrastructure to the cloud is this a business decision or a charitable one? Would it be cheaper, for you, to fire them all and hire replacements/do the migration yourself? Or is training them as part of doing the migration also the correct business decision?

They usually get trained for two jobs. The first is to help with migrations to the cloud. We need more people since they are acquiring a lot of companies. Then they also get cross trained as sys admins or network engineers since we need more of those too. On top of that, they also stay at the site they are at and continue that job doing IT support. I don't think the guys running the show want to come in and fire people when they acquire the companies, so they keep them on to kind of show everyone at that site everything will be fine. But they have to do something with them because they don't have anything on prem anymore to support. So I think it's a charitable one in a way so they don't rock the boat. But it's also a business one because these guys are usually underpaid. If they had to hire someone to do this in a high cost of living area, the pay would be much higher. So if they're good, they get a cheap employee. But they also leave because of that.

I guess I'm not seeing the angle where the employees should be grateful to the company. This sounds like it's cheaper for you to train them than it would be to hire replacements and additionally you hope they'll accept a lower salary. Should they be grateful your business didn't waste money firing and replacing them?

I would agree with you here. I'd do the same thing to be honest.

I've got a question -- do the cloud migrations actually pencil out in the long run, or is this some kind of book-cooking hedge fund thing?

Because IME the painful part about on-prem is the upfront migration and hardware cost, plus getting enough minimally-competent IT folx to maintain the thing -- if the company in question already has these things, while I can well believe that the major cloud providers will "help out" with resources to make the migration seem attractive in the short term, do they not bleed one dry in the long run with escalating fees for various needed resources, data storage, egress, etc. as time goes by?

They probably cost more in the long run, but that’s opex, not capex. Accounting prefers opex (and they don’t have to deal with depreciation). And it means fewer IT employees, and their inscrutable need for health and dental insurance.

Just that is enough to explain many of the cloud migrations.

All true -- I've BTDT, both directions. But OP seems to be describing a case where the capex and IT employees were already in place, and the (profit-focussed, presumably) hedge fund chose to move cloudward.

I'm asking whether this was for pump-and-dump reasons, or actually seen as healthier for the business.

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