41–50 of 189 posts
When I raised this issue, they simply buried me in paperwork + got almost no support from co-workers.
If your management doesn't get you the stuff you need to be productive your company is a failure. Move somewhere else.
Nearly right. I don't think many sales and finance people have that kind of authority either. That's why you see everyone using the company tools or free tiers. You need to sell to peoples bosses. Save time, make projects more transparent, take away freedom, that sort of thing. This is probably why Excel is so ubiquitous. Also that Excel is the most powerful tool that Corporate IT will let you have. Try and get Corpo…
However it looks like marketing people have a lot of buying power, probably since their job involves buying a lot of random things.
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.
So true. Getting a Copilot subscription for $10/mo was an uphill battle. My daily supply of coffee alone costs the company more that that.
If you have to fight for a 50$ 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‘…
Buying books and other learning resources is great, though.
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.
Doesn't mean there aren't worthwhile tools, because there are, but they're few and fast between.
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.
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.
Nearly right. I don't think many sales and finance people have that kind of authority either. That's why you see everyone using the company tools or free tiers. You need to sell to peoples bosses. Save time, make projects more transparent, take away freedom, that sort of thing. This is probably why Excel is so ubiquitous. Also that Excel is the most powerful tool that Corporate IT will let you have. Try and get Corpo…
It's too much work to approve all these random purchases, but if you don't review them, you end up paying for a bunch of unused subscriptions all over the place as well as people buying a ton of stuff that doesn't really benefit the company that much.