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when you read Hacker News thread - every single one of them feels like the world is falling apart. Splunk is a dud or so everyone here thinks: https://silicona

when you read Hacker News thread - every single one of them feels like the world is falling apart. Splunk is a dud or so everyone here thinks: https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/23/splunk-shares-surge-strong-earnings-revenue-outlook-beats/ https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/23/splunk-shares-surge-stro...

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Everything on HN should be taken with a big ol' bag of salt. To do otherwise will cause you to miss out on both employment and investment opportunities you won't find elsewhere.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  what other resources do you read?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I read everything I can consume (news, analysis, mailing lists, etc), but find smaller or private forums to be most valuable for participation. "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Definitely true that HN comments should be taken with a grain of salt from a business / investment / employment perspective. But it's more useful - though still not the full story at all of course - as a finger on the pulse of the people who actually implement software products, rather than their business models and their sales and marketing. This is not intended to downplay the importance of any of those things! Those people are just not the majority of the audience here. (I honestly wish I knew where they hang out, but I'm not sure there is such a place - all the people I know in those roles just play their cards much closer to their chests than those of us who participate here.)
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    It's not really a pulse of implementers either. It's a particular kind of engineer. Having been early in a big tech and watching it grow and now being in another startup, I can tell you that the attitudes for SaaS in the industry are much more either positive or calculating than the broad negative attitudes and the constant calls for NIH on here. If anything they remind me of my cohort of college undergrads, excited to write lots of code and poo-poo existing solutions because of how "easy" they are. Our attitudes changed once our time was worth more. As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? The community chants grift, scam, and enshittification at pretty much any change in the customer contract these days. Is that the kind of environment that someone on the business side will find welcoming?
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Well, nothing can give a fully accurate pulse, because response bias is pretty much inescapable. There's always a huge part of the iceberg that is submerged. To me, HN rings as a truer pulse of "silicon valley / startupy software developers" than the alternatives on reddit or twitter or mastodon or elsewhere that I've read to a significant degree. Everyplace has its own unique culture with their own unique echo chambers and blind spots driven by the people who opt in to that particular place, and HN is no different. But having said that, your comment (and the thread-starter) is a pretty good example of "getting a pulse"! A pulse isn't just "the average viewpoint", it also includes the distribution. And for every bit of conventional HN wisdom like "splunk sucks and is too expensive", there is pretty much always a comment like "splunk is pretty successful, actually". Your "I've been around a long time and attitudes toward SaaSes are actually pretty positive or at least calculating" is part of the "pulse" in this thread. To wit: I honestly had no idea about splunk. I played with it in the distant past and thought "cool!", but I've never used it in the auspices of an enterprise license, and I've certainly never tried to purchase one myself, so I just didn't know anything about this. And if you had asked me about their recent earnings, I would have similarly had no clue. I just had no idea what the "pulse" on splunk was, either way. And now, because of the zeitgeisty comments making fun of how expensive it is, and also the comments like yours and the thread-starter's pushing back on that narrative, I have an updated prior on the splunk. It surely isn't the full story, and I wouldn't walk into a conversation and be all "I'm an expert on splunk, folks!", but I have a much better sense than I did a few hours ago. That's what I mean by "pulse". > As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? I didn't say I think they'd be here... I'm the one who pointed out that they aren't! Honestly not sure how you read into my comment what you seem to have read into it. But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to rant a bit!
sanderjd 3y ago
This is not actually dissonant! HN is mostly a place where technologists gather, not corporate heads of IT or other business people. This is especially true of the subset of users who actively participate rather than only reading. And it is not unusual in the least for an enterprise product to be wildly profitable but not admired by technologists. Indeed, it's the default; Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc. What is interesting is to look for examples of things that break this mold, that are both profitable and mostly admired. Frankly, I can't think of any... All the ones I can think of were out-competed and either acquired and ruined or just run out of business. Maybe RedHat is the closest example... I'm not sure though.
- ping00 3y ago
  great point
- davinci123 3y ago
  agreed, i will qualify it more as SV developers which is like maybe 20-30% of the dev population?
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yes, for sure. But I don't think there's really a great place to get a zeitgeist of the rest of the population. I think they're mostly doing other stuff rather than talking about technology on internet forums. (They're smarter than us.)
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  > that are both profitable and mostly admired AWS?
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Actually yeah, closer than most. I think it's a somewhat grudging admiration at this point, increasingly so as they do more and more also-ran services. But yeah, this does seem right for the "core" services; ec2, s3, maybe lambda, etc.
adra 3y ago
Splunk was an absolute game changer when a company I worked for bought it. I say bought because we started to pay for it before anyone actually used it for anything meaningful. The "adoption" (blaming the company that bought it not Splunk) was terrible and teams were left to find value or not at their discretion without onboarding/training. The tool itself when I started using it was brilliant and quite deep on capabilities. All that said, the cost structure for the product can and SHOULD scare away any SMBs. Hosted or cloud, you're probably paying way beyond the value it's bringing in. That's probably the single largest determinant to the product.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
It's pretty wild to read some of these comments. Splunk is one of the best products I've ever used, bar none. The price is another matter (it's bloody expensive, no doubt about it), but the tool is amazing. I think all the people talking about how much it sucks and can be easily replaced are so far off base they aren't even in the stadium.
- flounder3 3y ago
  You've clearly never run it at scale nor have you migrated between Enterprise (on-prem) and Splunk Cloud at scale. Managing .conf files and eliminating intermediate IDM logic was absolutely not "amazing." https://lantern.splunk.com/Splunk_Platform/Splunk_Cloud_Platform_Migration/The_Victoria_Experience/The_Victoria_Experience https://lantern.splunk.com/Splunk_Platform/Splunk_Cloud_Plat...

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Everything on HN should be taken with a big ol' bag of salt. To do otherwise will cause you to miss out on both employment and investment opportunities you won't find elsewhere.

moneywoes 3y ago
what other resources do you read?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I read everything I can consume (news, analysis, mailing lists, etc), but find smaller or private forums to be most valuable for participation. "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
sanderjd 3y ago
Definitely true that HN comments should be taken with a grain of salt from a business / investment / employment perspective. But it's more useful - though still not the full story at all of course - as a finger on the pulse of the people who actually implement software products, rather than their business models and their sales and marketing. This is not intended to downplay the importance of any of those things! Those people are just not the majority of the audience here. (I honestly wish I knew where they hang out, but I'm not sure there is such a place - all the people I know in those roles just play their cards much closer to their chests than those of us who participate here.)
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  It's not really a pulse of implementers either. It's a particular kind of engineer. Having been early in a big tech and watching it grow and now being in another startup, I can tell you that the attitudes for SaaS in the industry are much more either positive or calculating than the broad negative attitudes and the constant calls for NIH on here. If anything they remind me of my cohort of college undergrads, excited to write lots of code and poo-poo existing solutions because of how "easy" they are. Our attitudes changed once our time was worth more. As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? The community chants grift, scam, and enshittification at pretty much any change in the customer contract these days. Is that the kind of environment that someone on the business side will find welcoming?
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Well, nothing can give a fully accurate pulse, because response bias is pretty much inescapable. There's always a huge part of the iceberg that is submerged. To me, HN rings as a truer pulse of "silicon valley / startupy software developers" than the alternatives on reddit or twitter or mastodon or elsewhere that I've read to a significant degree. Everyplace has its own unique culture with their own unique echo chambers and blind spots driven by the people who opt in to that particular place, and HN is no different. But having said that, your comment (and the thread-starter) is a pretty good example of "getting a pulse"! A pulse isn't just "the average viewpoint", it also includes the distribution. And for every bit of conventional HN wisdom like "splunk sucks and is too expensive", there is pretty much always a comment like "splunk is pretty successful, actually". Your "I've been around a long time and attitudes toward SaaSes are actually pretty positive or at least calculating" is part of the "pulse" in this thread. To wit: I honestly had no idea about splunk. I played with it in the distant past and thought "cool!", but I've never used it in the auspices of an enterprise license, and I've certainly never tried to purchase one myself, so I just didn't know anything about this. And if you had asked me about their recent earnings, I would have similarly had no clue. I just had no idea what the "pulse" on splunk was, either way. And now, because of the zeitgeisty comments making fun of how expensive it is, and also the comments like yours and the thread-starter's pushing back on that narrative, I have an updated prior on the splunk. It surely isn't the full story, and I wouldn't walk into a conversation and be all "I'm an expert on splunk, folks!", but I have a much better sense than I did a few hours ago. That's what I mean by "pulse". > As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? I didn't say I think they'd be here... I'm the one who pointed out that they aren't! Honestly not sure how you read into my comment what you seem to have read into it. But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to rant a bit!

sanderjd 3y ago

This is not actually dissonant! HN is mostly a place where technologists gather, not corporate heads of IT or other business people. This is especially true of the subset of users who actively participate rather than only reading. And it is not unusual in the least for an enterprise product to be wildly profitable but not admired by technologists. Indeed, it's the default; Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc. What is interesting is to look for examples of things that break this mold, that are both profitable and mostly admired. Frankly, I can't think of any... All the ones I can think of were out-competed and either acquired and ruined or just run out of business. Maybe RedHat is the closest example... I'm not sure though.

ping00 3y ago
great point
davinci123 3y ago
agreed, i will qualify it more as SV developers which is like maybe 20-30% of the dev population?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yes, for sure. But I don't think there's really a great place to get a zeitgeist of the rest of the population. I think they're mostly doing other stuff rather than talking about technology on internet forums. (They're smarter than us.)
reducesuffering 3y ago
> that are both profitable and mostly admired AWS?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Actually yeah, closer than most. I think it's a somewhat grudging admiration at this point, increasingly so as they do more and more also-ran services. But yeah, this does seem right for the "core" services; ec2, s3, maybe lambda, etc.

adra 3y ago

Splunk was an absolute game changer when a company I worked for bought it. I say bought because we started to pay for it before anyone actually used it for anything meaningful. The "adoption" (blaming the company that bought it not Splunk) was terrible and teams were left to find value or not at their discretion without onboarding/training. The tool itself when I started using it was brilliant and quite deep on capabilities. All that said, the cost structure for the product can and SHOULD scare away any SMBs. Hosted or cloud, you're probably paying way beyond the value it's bringing in. That's probably the single largest determinant to the product.

bigstrat2003 3y ago

It's pretty wild to read some of these comments. Splunk is one of the best products I've ever used, bar none. The price is another matter (it's bloody expensive, no doubt about it), but the tool is amazing. I think all the people talking about how much it sucks and can be easily replaced are so far off base they aren't even in the stadium.

flounder3 3y ago
You've clearly never run it at scale nor have you migrated between Enterprise (on-prem) and Splunk Cloud at scale. Managing .conf files and eliminating intermediate IDM logic was absolutely not "amazing." https://lantern.splunk.com/Splunk_Platform/Splunk_Cloud_Platform_Migration/The_Victoria_Experience/The_Victoria_Experience https://lantern.splunk.com/Splunk_Platform/Splunk_Cloud_Plat...