How to combat the "Time is money" argument?

Gamer’s Nexus’ Stephan “Steve” Burke recently said in one of his Ask GN videos that he would never consider switching his workforce to using a Linux system because even though it might provide a benefit for image rendering and video encoding, it’s not worth it to him because he would need to re-educate his workforce on the use of open-source systems, claiming they already have hardware they can toss into systems when they need to perform tasks rather quickly, being an outlet of information about PC hardware, and already having the hardware to do just that.

What can counter his argument?

I’m not sure it can be countered. It is a valid argument. Perhaps one of the most valid ones he could come up with. Your knowledge base is your most valuable asset in any project, much more valuable than any tool you are using. You work with what you know and honed yourself into. That’s how you do your best work. If you don’t, then you are just not that good at it in the first place.

I don’t know who Stephan Burke is, or what he does. But the factor time is also of great importance in today’s environment. And not just because of its relation to cost, which is of utmost importance in businesses because it has a direct impact on risk and benefit calculations (*). But also due to the rapid development of the technologies we use and how we can be locked in a perpetual race against better technologies if we don’t already dominate the scene.

I often tell my students you don’t port your system to another language to improve its performance by 10%. You just buy a computer that is 10% faster. This is good engineering.


(*) We programmers like to think of ourselves as having all the knowledge (particular about what is best for the company and the users, when in fact, behind their backs, we trade among ourselves some of the most cruel boss and user jokes in any profession). But in fact we know very little besides how to code. We are that much idiots. And we have an hard time grasping the concepts of finance and accounting, which prevailed for far longer than our profession and helped establish the grounds for all the business and technological development that we enjoy and share today. The coder that finally understands their code is far less important than the historically proven methods to calculate cost, benefit and risk in the ancient discipline of economics, has finally achieved Nirvana and can spread the Tao of Programming.

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@marfig There just has to be a way to like this post more than once!

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Hallo

Everything depends upon the situation. The strongest argument for “going FLOSS” is control combined with freedom. When the situation changes so that these considerations become the dominant considerations then the willingness to make the required investment (time etc., in a business it’s just another way of saying money) increases. At some stage in the evolution of the situation a point may be reached when making the change becomes the “obvious” choice.

It underscores the importance of making start-ups aware that they may have a choice of OS, providing that their field of activity is supported by existing FLOSS tools. Once an organisation has invested in training or building functioning teams, well the die is set (see the above paragraph and marfig’s post).

Time is money no doubt about it…Expand the time frame.

This point of view is certainly valid in the short term by looking only at the time spent relearning how to use a new OS and applications. The offset can be the cost of replacement hardware when the next released OS won’t run correctly on the existing hardware. I’m using a hand me down laptop which is running a modern OS.

Except that applies to the average consumer; _My OP refers to a group of people who can “throw more hardware at the problem” in order to resolve it, which invalidates the claim a later version of Windows would cause them problems when they’re significantly far and beyond what’s necessary for Windows to run.

I’m talking about $1,500 video cards, $1,000 processors, $200 memory etc. High-end, top-tier stuff. They’d certainly have no problem running any version of Windows in multiple, nested VMs!

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In that case I wouldn’t even bother to combat - he’s got a point and PLENTY of money!

I often miss the first and rarely get the second. What's his secret?

Probably lost of hard work at the expense of relationships … I don’t know anything about him either.