[MattGaiser]

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling.

Because it is too much work to convince the company that spending $500 on JRebel to have me not go on Hacker News for 5 (and it turns into 15) minutes while the thing compiles (my last company). I also have no real stake in whether the product ships in one month or two so I am not paying for it myself.

To pay for tooling, productivity needs to be a priority. I have never worked anywhere where productivity was discussed.

[TeMPOraL]

Exactly this.

Ultimately, the tools I try out are the ones that don't make me involve other people in it, whether to inform or to get approval. This is extremely important at the beginning - particularly when I don't know the tool beforehand, so testing it is a bet.

Thus, extrapolating from my experience, I'd consider the main problem with paid tooling is that it usually requires getting other people in the loop. Even if it's sold in a way where you could use your personal paid license at work, that fact is very often unclear from the license text - unclear enough that you probably don't want the risk of procurement/legal disagreeing with your assessment.

(If we're talking SaaS/anything with on-line components, there's no way I'm touching this on my own - I have enough headache with exports control around remote work, I'm not going to risk anything I do be considered technology transfer.)

I feel I'm not atypical with this - I suspect developers in general have an opposite relationship with software licensing to that of their employer. For a company, OSS is random, unpredictable - while commercial licensing is safe, because there's a contract and a way to sue someone. For a developer, OSS is easy to understood, zero risk, no need to involve other people - while commercial is completely arbitrary, every piece of software has a different license, and thus it's very strongly preferred to involve management/procurement/legal in this, because you don't want the liability on your shoulders.

[FridgeSeal]

I cannot possibly agree more with that last paragraph, you’ve summarised that so well.

A discussion I was party to recently was debating which of open source vs several competing commercial products to use for a new development. Chief complaint raised about open source product by the team members on the business side of things was “oh it’s open source, that means there’ll be no support right?”. Comparatively my teammate and I had the reverse reaction: we know for a fact the open source alternative is at least 90% as good, if not better than the alternatives, we don’t have to wait to go through the rigmarole of purchasing, approvals, waiting for someone to sign contracts, finance to sort things, finding out you need another key because another person will be working on it as well, discovering the support is invariably shitty, and then being stuck with it when it turns out to be poor software and the business side won’t budge, because that means they’ll need to do things again (which will take weeks at best) and they’ll inevitably just end up re-signing the contract for another year.

[bcrosby95]

Some companies will care. Some won't. I mentioned something like this to mine and they upgraded the build server in response.

For Jetbrains products, if you enjoy them you can use your personal license commercially. Your company just can't pay for it or reimburse you for it. This is the route I go because I use their products for personal projects too. For me it's a no brainer at $150/year for their all-products option (...for the 3rd year, 1st is $250, 2nd is $200).

[hyperpallium2]

I'm toying with the idea of selling developer tools only as personal licenses that can be used commercially. Like a driver's "license", companies must hire "licensed" developers to drive the software. (also licensed plumbers, electricians, accountants, surgeons etc - though true all are skill/knowledge credentials, not simply purchasable; so include an exam).

Companies need to hire and pay more for "licensed" developers.

It gives power to developers - and then I don't have to sell to managers or deal with uninterested clerks.

[Siira]

> It gives power to developers It gives power to senior, rich developers, at the cost of newcomers. It's a toxic zero-sum play, which contributes to, e.g., shitty 10x overpriced health-care.

[Stratoscope]

Same here. It costs me less than fifty cents a day to be able to use all the JetBrains IDEs and developer tools and get all their updates, both for my personal projects and for work.

I can only speak for myself, but to me, "no brainer" is an understatement.

[XorNot]

I do this as well - its pretty easy to justify a Jetbrains Ultimate subscription for myself since it makes life so much easier.

[MattGaiser]

I get this for free with an annual UX interview, but yes I would pay for Jetbrains personally.

[apple4ever]

That is all way too much money.

If they want more adoption, they need to be under the $100 mark.

[marcinzm]

$150/year is too much for developers who earn $100k+/year?

I guess you proved the original point of this thread.

[scaladev]

Don't forget there are a couple hundred countries besides US. I make a relatively decent living by our standards, but nowhere near close to $100k/year. $150-250 per year is quite a bit of money for us.

[arthur_sav]

I'm surprised it's not at least $1000/year.

Even if you make 30k a year, $200 for access to a variety of tools you rely on to do your job is a no brainer.

[infinite8s]

It should be possible for a small devtools company to price differently based on locale, but I expect the support costs would then dominate any of the lower prices customers.

[ipaddr]

I think the core point missed in this thread is: developers write software for a living. They do not want to pay for something they would love someone to pay them to write.

You see this in other professions. A car mechanic doesn't want to take there car to someone else. A doctor tries to avoid general checkups with other doctors. A realitor will sell their own house. A grass cutter doesn't hire someone to cut his lawn. The person who makes lawnmowers doesn't buy one he makes one even if it takes longer.

[Stratoscope]

I would love for someone to pay me to write an IDE. I've been in that situation a couple of times in the past (SQLWindows, Visual Basic) and it was a lot of fun.

However, my current job is developing a voice response system for restaurant drive-thrus. I don't have time to write my own IDE right now!

So I farm that out to JetBrains and get to use all of their awesome work for less than fifty cents a day.

If that's too much, their free versions are very good too.

I may also take exception to this:

> A doctor tries to avoid general checkups with other doctors.

Wouldn't the opposite be true? As far as I know, every psychiatrist has a psychiatrist, every counselor has a counselor (or should), and I would guess that every doctor has a doctor.

A doctor is more likely than the rest of us to have particular insight into their own health, but I don't think they try to do it all alone.

Of course I'm only speaking for myself. If anyone prefers to write all their own tools, more power to them!

[amarant]

Agreed. I also run Linux, because at the end of the day, I don't want to write a new OS when someone else had already done that.

[cema]

Then there is this saying that if a lawyer represents himself in a court, he has a fool for a customer

[lelanthran]

> Then there is this saying that if a lawyer represents himself in a court, he has a fool for a customer

Also making the reverse assertion true too: that client has a fool for a lawyer :-)

Of course, many unsuspecting non-lawyer clients also have fools for lawyers; it's hard to tell whether or not your lawyer is any good (unless his name is Saul Goodman)

[apple4ever]

That's a lot of money to me, despite how much I earn.

Especially when the options are free.

[ta988]

Sure you can walk instead of having a bike, a car or taking public transport.

[apple4ever]

I think that's a bad example.

A car lets me do a lot of things, not just a single thing.

I think development tools are overpriced. Under a $100 I can see. Over that is just too much.

[arthur_sav]

The username makes it even funnier.

[apple4ever]

Only if you don't think about it.

I pay more for Apple products because they bring a lot of value.

I don't see the value for many developer tools at their price.

[MattGaiser]

That's the price for an all you can code subscription to everything. Individual licenses are much cheaper.

[bigbillheck]

$250 (the initial all-you-can-gobble) is a day's wages or less for anybody making more than $62500 (post-tax) per annum, which at least in the US is not a lot at all.

[thequux]

That $250 isn't (generally) tax-deductible. At the moment, I'm making ~€80k as a SWE in Belgium (reasonably good pay but not the highest), and my net income is closer to €150/day. At the top of my career, I expect that I could increase that to at most €200/day because taxation is brutal.

This is not to say that I don't pay for tools; I subscribe to the full Jetbrains set among other things. It's just that that wasn't as simple of a decision as you present it.

[searedsteak]

Is it not in Belgium? In Germany you can count this as 'Werbungskosten' which you can deduct from your income. Anything you use for your job or for professional development counts as this type of expense. Don't other countries have similar concepts in their tax systems?

[bigbillheck]

Then for someone in your position it'd be a day and a half of post-tax salary (for the first year), which doesn't sound like a lot either.

[apple4ever]

$250 is a lot of money for many people, even if they make over $62,000.

[ta988]

And the price goes down over time, third year is $150...

[FroshKiller]

On my team of three, my teammate and I had to create a presentation for our project leader that he could share with our director making a case for buying ReSharper licenses for the two of us. Then of course our director declined to spend the money. It was tedious and infuriating.

[MattGaiser]

You were probably paid more in salary to make that presentation than those licenses cost, lol.

[zikzak]

That is literally how I have justified every single expenditure on tools for myself and my team for going on twenty years.

[TheRealDunkirk]

I've spent many, many hundreds of dollars for development software out of my own pocket, because, just like with high-quality hand tools, good software tools pay for themselves over time. Even given what I make in the manufacturing world, these expenses don't account for a lot of my take-home pay, and I make half (or less!) of what hot-shots in tech make. I'm not worried about being reviewed on my productivity, I just want to get the work done faster and better for myself.

[galaxyLogic]

I think you make an interesting point. The employer maybe thinks like this: If those dev-tools are so great then let the programmers pay for them? If it increases productivity like they say and price is small compared to their salary, wouldn't they want to pay for it.

One alternative approach I could think of that the employer should give each programmer a dev-tools -budget per year. That would encourage programmers to experiment with better tools and find the best ones.

[marcinzm]

Depends on the company and the manager. If someone on my team wants something at or under $500 then no problem unless they have a habit of buying tools they never use. It's my job to make sure my boss doesn't raise a fuss about it and not the developers.