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> You get paid next year a rate based on how productive you are today. Not particularly. While highly paid developers like to pretend the industry is some platonic ideal meritocracy, no one has any real ability to measure individual productivity, or to predict it with any precision in hiring, so, no, that's not a particularly good approximation of reality, certainly not where a 1% improvement would would even be noticeable in the noise of assessment. Realistically, you might be justified in saying that my pay 5 years from now will be affected by the aggregate productivity in the past of developers generally and the broad, easily observed factors that conventional industry wisdom assesses as individual predictors of productivity within those broad aggregates. But, with that in mind, investing time in promoting online the idea that things I already have on my resume are predictors of productivity, while unlikely to have noticeable real impact, is probably a better cost/benefit trade-off than paying for dev tools, even if my employer was going to let me use personally purchased tools, which they aren't. Outside of corporate work, in the personal development time I spend which does have impacts on bit actual productivity and my ability to have indicia of productivity that the market values and where I do have the choice of tools, assessing and paying for dev tools is more friction than benefit. I did it more when the gap between paid tools and free tools in quality was much higher and (because the internet as an easy discovery/distribution medium was not what it is today) the friction between the two was closer. Even though at the time the financial cost compared to my means was much greater. |