$1500 + 15 to 20 days work. However wonderful librarians are, they don't get paid $1000/day, so it's still a good deal. But not quite as good a deal as the headline suggests.
When universities ask us to whip up one of these babies we quote a number much closer to $25k than to $1.5k. One reason is that the fully loaded cost of the cheapest engineer capable of doing this is probably about $10k for a man-month. (I don't know what librarians make in Iowa but if it was less than $8k fully loaded I'm going to be surprised).
Also, after you install it you have to support it, and these are not the easiest customers in the world to deal with. (Not the worst, either, but an intermediate engineer answer the phone and walk you through how to clear a print jam -- not that any of our customers would ever call four times in a year about a print jam, mind you, this is totally hypothetical -- is not the cheapest endeavor in the world.)
I would think the kiosk needs to be integrated into the library's primary catalog software database. If other libraries use different catalog software, he would need to do integration work for those other types of catalog systems.
The economies of scale would still apply but it's probably more involved than just churning out kiosks.
It takes us X% less time to create the 2nd and subsequent units relative to the first, and we charge Y% less money for them. They are certainly not 60/20 but if you're thinking in that general direction you understand custom software development pretty well.
But it only cost $1500 extra. His salary is already in the budget. No need to do a fund raiser to pay him. At which point, since that money was going to be spent anyways, the only real cost from his time is the opportunity cost for what else he could have been doing.
the only real cost from his time is the opportunity cost for what else he could have been doing
Exactly--and since you're bringing economics into picture, the opportunity cost should exactly equal the wages expended on developing this. OP makes a valid point.
OTOH if the marginal cost of production is really 1/20th of the next-best solution, then his employer should easily be able to recoup that by rolling out a bunch of these.
Exactly--and since you're bringing economics into picture, the opportunity cost should exactly equal the wages expended on developing this. OP makes a valid point.
Not necessarily, if his job includes some degree of "on demand" responsibilities--it said he was a librarian who handles some tech support, so chances are a lot of what he's being paid for is just being there when needed. On a slow day, he'd be there anyway and getting paid the same, so working on something like this is a clear win over, I don't know, dusting shelves or something.
Yes, but then you'd probably have to subtract the amount of time that he would have spent implementing the other type of solution or getting training on how to administer it. The salary doesn't necessarily have to be included; it's a fixed cost.
