6 ms·

Sorry but I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Google Analytics and BigQuery are both nominally free, the service expense is $1K/year, and the impleme

Sorry but I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Google Analytics and BigQuery are both nominally free, the service expense is $1K/year, and the implementation cost literally a few minutes of my time.

williamcotton 3y ago
I’m not being sarcastic. There is engineering labor that requires hooking up all of these events. Then there is maintenance costs. And many more costs, direct or otherwise.
- staticautomatic 3y ago
  With respect to the example I gave, no, there actually isn’t. In fact I don’t even understand what you think the work and costs involved are.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    I’ve seen organizations spend millions just in engineering labor costs for such endeavors. But sure, for small companies with limited domain events to begin with, the costs are relatively lower, and probably with the lower domain complexity it is less of a share of engineering time overall. But there are still opportunity costs! It’s not free to install dependencies across numerous code bases and hook into and label the events, even for a small business.
    - fifilura 3y ago
      OP suggests using "built-in GA4->BQ transfer [to send] ALL the data". This seems like an extremely small endeavor.
      - williamcotton 3y ago
        So yes, for a small business that just drops a GA snippet into the bottom of their app it is inexpensive. I’m not sure that this qualifies as the “modern data stack”. That’s also not what happens when a larger company integrates Segment into their applications! That takes many engineering months to set up and then maintain for the lifetime of the app. If the full costs are analyzed, is the money spent well? There’s sone irony here in that much effort is put towards analysis of user behavior but very little effort put towards accounting for where the money is spent internally. That is why there is a slowdown in customers using these MDS products, not what the author of the article claims, rather that when feet are put to the fire, expensive services that haven’t paid off their debt are given the axe.
        fifilura 3y ago
        I think i can spot the difference in interpretation here. GG*GGP "someone in our org will ostensibly have a good reason for setting up an event in Google Analytics" In this case they already have Google Analytics. The question is whether it was worth exporting that data to BigQuery. Then whether it was worth setting up GA in the first place is not discussed.
        williamcotton 3y ago
        Isn't the setup cost a key part of the total cost of analytics, especially when it comes to these MDS systems? I encourage anyone in a position to make purchases or who has a say in what engineer labor focuses on is to get a copy of Horngren's Cost Accounting. It should make my position very clear! FWIW, there is indeed capitalization occurring when an organization incorporates analytics, even the "measure all the things" approach, but the question is, once the total costs are discovered, does the return outweigh the expenditure? These things cannot be considered in isolation, especially when using advanced approaches like Activity-Based Costing, something that is basically a requirement for a product or service that is fundamentally software in nature. There is too much complexity to treat managerial accounting in a software setting like a steel mill. The reason why this doesn't happen is YOLO business management fueled by the casino that is VC backed companies. But we are in a rapidly maturing industry where margins are slimming and costs need to be reigned in, especially in publicly traded companies where investors will punish a company that makes wildly off target financial projections discovered when cash flows are reported in the following quarters. I encourage everyone in all management positions to start thinking about and tracking actual costs. Not story points, not customer use patterns, but cold hard cash!

williamcotton 3y ago

I’m not being sarcastic. There is engineering labor that requires hooking up all of these events. Then there is maintenance costs. And many more costs, direct or otherwise.

staticautomatic 3y ago
With respect to the example I gave, no, there actually isn’t. In fact I don’t even understand what you think the work and costs involved are.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I’ve seen organizations spend millions just in engineering labor costs for such endeavors. But sure, for small companies with limited domain events to begin with, the costs are relatively lower, and probably with the lower domain complexity it is less of a share of engineering time overall. But there are still opportunity costs! It’s not free to install dependencies across numerous code bases and hook into and label the events, even for a small business.
  - fifilura 3y ago
    OP suggests using "built-in GA4->BQ transfer [to send] ALL the data". This seems like an extremely small endeavor.
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      So yes, for a small business that just drops a GA snippet into the bottom of their app it is inexpensive. I’m not sure that this qualifies as the “modern data stack”. That’s also not what happens when a larger company integrates Segment into their applications! That takes many engineering months to set up and then maintain for the lifetime of the app. If the full costs are analyzed, is the money spent well? There’s sone irony here in that much effort is put towards analysis of user behavior but very little effort put towards accounting for where the money is spent internally. That is why there is a slowdown in customers using these MDS products, not what the author of the article claims, rather that when feet are put to the fire, expensive services that haven’t paid off their debt are given the axe.
      - fifilura 3y ago
        I think i can spot the difference in interpretation here. GG*GGP "someone in our org will ostensibly have a good reason for setting up an event in Google Analytics" In this case they already have Google Analytics. The question is whether it was worth exporting that data to BigQuery. Then whether it was worth setting up GA in the first place is not discussed.
        williamcotton 3y ago
        Isn't the setup cost a key part of the total cost of analytics, especially when it comes to these MDS systems? I encourage anyone in a position to make purchases or who has a say in what engineer labor focuses on is to get a copy of Horngren's Cost Accounting. It should make my position very clear! FWIW, there is indeed capitalization occurring when an organization incorporates analytics, even the "measure all the things" approach, but the question is, once the total costs are discovered, does the return outweigh the expenditure? These things cannot be considered in isolation, especially when using advanced approaches like Activity-Based Costing, something that is basically a requirement for a product or service that is fundamentally software in nature. There is too much complexity to treat managerial accounting in a software setting like a steel mill. The reason why this doesn't happen is YOLO business management fueled by the casino that is VC backed companies. But we are in a rapidly maturing industry where margins are slimming and costs need to be reigned in, especially in publicly traded companies where investors will punish a company that makes wildly off target financial projections discovered when cash flows are reported in the following quarters. I encourage everyone in all management positions to start thinking about and tracking actual costs. Not story points, not customer use patterns, but cold hard cash!