[hinkley]

Too often we get the reverse. Slick salesman targets the person with budgetary discretion while avoiding letting the users in in the transaction, so by the time they can complain about how terrible the product is, the check has already cleared.

[jonathanlydall]

Speaking as software developer and company co-founder for a product for use by other developers, the company employing those salesmen is very possibly overall losing money on these deals.

In our early days we had on occasion managed to directly convince non-developer decision makers in an organization to use our product (even though it wasn't an intentional strategy) and this invariably failed unless we also managed to get full buy-in from the developers who will actually use it.

These days we have an explicit rule that we don't go ahead with any customer engagement until we can see that a project's lead developer is fully sold on our product, otherwise we waste loads of time (which is essentially money) on ultimately fruitless retention attempts instead of using the time more productively on ideal customer opportunities.

Now it does depend on the nature of the product though. For a product used by only a small subset of a company (like our product), it's probably a bad strategy to sell to the execs instead of the users. But for a product like an ERP (think SAP, or Oracle ERP), these are deals worth USD millions (sometimes 10s of, or more) and convincing the execs is a highly (or possibly the only) effective strategy.

[mlinhares]

Yup, then the technical people have to deal with the bullshit and nightmare that is implementing the shitty thing that was purchased. Hard to get around this in large enterprises, someone just decides they're going to use some shitty tool (like that cloud provider no one uses but has great sales folks) and you just get a notice you have to migrate all your apps to the new thing in 3 months cos they got a better contract there.

The school district my kids are changes the parent app almost every year, its always a nightmare for everyone involved, I can't imagine what it is like to work IT in such a place.

[hinkley]

I believe open source is approximately an order of magnitude larger than it would be if developers controlled their own purchasing. What FOSS introduced was the ability to use software without someone with a little power saying no, you can’t, because we won’t pay for it.

Jetbrains threaded this needle for years by having professional licenses tied to an individual with clauses for time and location shifting. So you could use their software at home, drive to work and also use the same license there.

And they priced it at around the cost of three tech books per year, which it is at least that useful for productivity. I suspect we would be in better shape now if others had copied their model. Rather than the (defunct) Microsoft model of ignoring home piracy and demanding commercial licenses from any company large enough to make it economical to fire off a cease and desist to them and demand back pay.

[Terr_]

> Jetbrains threaded this needle for years by having professional licenses tied to an individual with clauses for time and location shifting. So you could use their software at home, drive to work and also use the same license there.

It's a very, er, "enlightened self-interest" model, because it makes me "sticky" as a customer, since I'm less likely to learn a completely different IDE for work and then use that one for my own projects and eventually ditch theirs.

[scarface_74]

My company gives each employee $500 per year for anything tangentially related to improving their job - training, subscriptions, etc.

We also get 40 hours a year that we can take off for skill development. It can be to learn something new or conferences.

[spauldo]

Nice. We got told we should "have some pride" and clean the office on our own time.

[hinkley]

I’d like to also see a group fund where the dev team collectively parcels out donations to open source projects the company relies upon.