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Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

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Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

#11

Post by genocidicbunny »

toenail wrote: post #4

If your management doesn't get you the stuff you need to be productive your company is a failure. Move somewhere else.

Depends on the tool. I've seen engineers ask for an IDA license to try to debug a pretty simple memory overrun crash. The manager rightfully told that engineer to go use Visual Studio first.

Otoh, if management isn't willing to drop $50 on a one time purchase that increases your productivity, it's definitely a flag. Maybe not a red one, but at least mauve.

Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

#14

Post by watermelon0 »

jessekv wrote: post #8

I always liked the Sublime Text model. You pay once, and keep your licence no matter where you work. Same with my keyboard. I like to own my tools.

Jetbrains tools are the same; you can buy personal subscription, and use the tools no matter where you work.

If you have a subscription for 12 consecutive months, you get perpetual fallback license for version of the tools that were available at the start of the period.

Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

#16

Post by genocidicbunny »

jessekv wrote: post #8

I always liked the Sublime Text model. You pay once, and keep your licence no matter where you work. Same with my keyboard. I like to own my tools.

Everywhere I've worked the managers liked Sublimes model too. To the point where at one place we built a few plugins for Sublime because so many of the engineers were using it. It was cheap enough that reimbursing engineers for the license was easy to get approved and everyone liked being able to hold onto their individual license after.

Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

#17

Post by pompino »

toenail wrote: post #4

If your management doesn't get you the stuff you need to be productive your company is a failure. Move somewhere else.

The problem is who decides what really matters? Every department is biased towards their own needs. Upper management is usually clueless when it comes to technical needs, even if they've done the job before - because it was probably 10+ years ago.

Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

#19

Post by delichon »

Here's my puchasing power: "Boss, if we buy this developer tool it will save X hours of developer time." ... where X is large compared to the price of the tool. It works well enough that we use it often enough for Boss to be skeptical.

Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority

#20

Post by rightbyte »

endymi0n wrote: post #9

If you have to fight for a 50$ book, you‘re probably just at the wrong place. That being said, some developers wanted to test Notion internally, so they got an informal account with a credit card. Turns out they built an important overview in it and send the link around, so everyone who wanted to take a look at it (half the company) implicitly created an account and our CFO got hit by a 10k bill next month. And that‘…

This is just an example of predatory pricing models and dark patterns.

There is reason many SaaS companies usually have no prepaid or fixed cost roof pay options. They are scammers.

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