[Veserv]

Well, if you have a Google L5 making ~365k [1] then it would need to make them ~2.2% more productive overall to be worth it when just considering direct pay. If we consider a Google L3 at ~187k then it would need to make them ~4.2% more productive overall.

This, of course, ignores employee benefits and overhead which usually amount to ~100% extra costs over direct pay. So that is now ~1.1% and ~2.1%, respectively.

And that ignores the fact that you need to pay people less than they produce to be profitable which probably drops us down to ~0.5% and ~1.0%, respectively.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

edit: Incorrectly linked to product designer instead of software engineer levels.

[dima55]

OK... Most of us don't know what a "google l5" is, so I guess we can safely ignore this. Heh.

[eviks]

The major fail of such "just a 1% / cup of coffee" is that there is an infinite number of things you could pay for with the same potential productivity promise without any hard data on whether those are true, so just the fact the you can use a calculator and divide to get to a low % doesn't help you much if at all

[esafak]

No-one is going to spend $8K out of pocket to A/B test this on themselves. Of all the things you could be doing to improve your productivity, this is some high hanging fruit.

[Veserv]

If you have a US employer who is unwilling to spend 8 k$ on software engineering productivity then they are pennywise, pound foolish. It literally costs 10x that for a single junior engineer. And, as I pointed out, the net productivity improvement you need to see to justify that expense is miniscule.

If your employer really is skeptical, then they can run a A/B test over a small group of engineers to prove out changes in productivity. But not even being willing to run that test when it is so cheap is just management incompetence.

Engineers are ridiculously expensive. In electrical engineering, where the engineers are generally less well-paid than in software, employers routinely spend multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per engineer per year in tooling. Not being willing to spend 8 k$ on a test of well known technology and attempting to identify mere single digit percentage improvements is just stupid.

[ranger_danger]

Not everyone is Google. Some people work for themselves, or have very small teams, or live in a developing country, and don't have lots of spare cash laying around.

Please try to understand that the world is not as simple and black and white as you'd like.

[gregthelaw]

Undo founder here. We've been at this for getting on 20 years now. Originally it cost $295 for a perpetual license. Eventually we understood that the majority of developers (actually employers of developers) will pay $0. But some are happy to pay for tooling, as long as they're confident they'll get a many multiples return-on-investment. Hence our pricing. Happily, enough do that we can run a modest but profitable business (40+ people). Customer churn is practically zero.

Why do people pay for Undo when they can get rr -- which is also really good -- for free? Those whose code or environment is big enough and complex enough that rr doesn't work for them, and they understand how powerful time travel debugging is. If rr works for you, you should use it. This includes most independent developers.

If rr can work for you and you're still not using any kind of time travel debugging, you have effective tied one hand behind your own back! If you're independent (incl student or academic) and rr doesn't work for you, get in touch -- we give free licenses for academic and certain other use cases.

There is a wider thing here about software companies paying for dev tooling. So many companies over the years who made really cool things who couldn't make their business work.

[db48x]

> If […] you're still not using any kind of time travel debugging, you have effective tied one hand behind your own back!

Completely agree about that! I’ve used rr to debug things that I never could have without it. People are resistant to change though.

[more-nitor]

this

if someone's bringing "google payscale" for comparison... well that's not some average joe...

why not just bring Bill Gates and say "everything -- including private jet -- is dirt cheap" ?

$8k per year simply doesn't make sense for 95% of the programmers. For a lot of developing countries, that's more than a well-paying programmer's annual salary...

[Veserv]

I presented a conditional calculation using numbers contextually-relevant to a forum run by a company that funds US tech startups.

IF you are such a company, THEN you only need very minor productivity improvements to justify such a price difference. IF you are such a company, THEN such costs are well within the cost of doing business. IF you are NOT then you are free to apply your own numbers to your situation.

However, the overwhelming majority of companies that fall into the applicable category outright refuse to even consider the possibility of a 8 k$ capital expense on software development tooling out of the absolutely foolish belief that such expenditure CAN NOT be justified as such a cost could not possibly be recouped in benefits or out of the absolutely foolish belief that a product that costs 100$ must be 100x better than a product that costs 1$ to be justified, and thus a product that costs money must be infinitely better than a product that is free to be justified.

It is absolutely management incompetence for US employers to just shut down upon hearing about a 8 k$ capital expenditure instead of doing a proper cost-benefit analysis to determine if such expenditures would be justified.

[db48x]

I agree with you. At most companies your manager would never even think of spending that much money on you, even if it was completely justifiable. You’re lucky if you can get permission to buy a $50 book.

That said, if you’re going to spend money on a debugger then I recommend rr + Pernosco instead. Pernosco is a completely different kind of debugger that will make you much, much more productive at debugging than any traditional debugger where you start by adding breakpoints and then stepping through your code. Costs a lot less too.

[db48x]

You’re being pedantic for no reason.

[Veserv]

Ugh, it appears I was not utterly pedantic enough even though I did, quite clearly, make my statements conditional in a way far beyond what is normally expected when talking about generalities that any normal person would assume are meant to apply in cases contextually-relevant to a forum run by a company that funds US tech startups.

Very well, a software engineering employer in the US who employs over 10 software engineers in the US at above the 20th percentile of wages, which constitutes the employers of a significant fraction of total software engineers above the 20th percentile of wages, would be foolish to not spend 8 K$ on software development tooling that would result in a 10% productivity improvement. It would be further foolish to not investigate such potential improvements given a reasonably credible belief that such a productivity improvement is possible. Outright dismissal without even considering the potential cost-benefit or making a incorrect cost-benefit analysis requiring significantly in excess of 10% is also foolish.

Please try to understand that sometimes when people are not being utterly pedantic to the point of absurdity it is because they assume people will use their judgement to interpret the applicability to their situation rather than because they can only see in black and white.