71–80 of 189 posts
It depends on the company. One company I worked for had a policy of "Just buy what you need that makes your work easier: books, licenses, and even hardware. Management time spent on decisions is too expensive, so we default to instant approval." Did developers go on a buying spree? No, the same amount of stuff was bought as before the policy. And it did make life easier.
Netflix?
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.
In the early days, I could take people out for a $100 lunch, no problem, but I couldn’t buy a $30 card for my computer.
In the parent corporation, on the other hand, they could fairly easily get a $5,000 test rig, with no issue, but needed to fill out forms in triplicate to take you out to a fast food greasy spoon.
Towards the end of my tenure, you basically couldn’t do anything, at either place, without said forms.
But many successful dev tool companies have made their money by marketing to bosses, as opposed to devs. That goes for many fields; not just tech.
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…
Excel is ubiquitous because literally anyone can use it. Unlike a database, there is a direct visual representation of what you’re building. It is included in all m365 licenses and has been relatively cheap for a perpetual license for years. As for allowing WSL for sales, have you ever actually worked with someone in sales? At 99% of companies, even the most technically literate sales person can just barely send an e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. Companies won't approve buying an individual book, but they will approve a subscription to a learning platform. 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.
A learning platform that costs the same as a book per month per employee, and doesn’t have the book on it.
I mean sure, a cynical person might ask why even bother paying that guy when his salary could be divided up into $10K per team for a hundred books a year per team, but that kind of talk gets you dragged in front of HR for a "discussion".
I only had this issue the one time while I was an employee: I wanted a Thinkpad, but management insisted I got a shitty Dell. In the end, they got me a Thinkpad. Other than that, whenever I've asked for a book or some tool, I simply got it, even expensive split keyboards. Now that I'm self employed, I just buy what I need. Which isn't much, really. Very few "developer tools" are useful enough to spend money on, let a…
I got a shitty Dell. It broke. I got another shitty Dell. That broke. I got another shitty Dell. That broke. I got a shitty Dell.
BUT WE ONLY HAVE A CONTRACT WITH DELL. Perhaps you shouldn't have a contract with Dell? Silence. Then the brain gets going.
You realise the best bits of your life are when the Dell breaks because it takes 5 days for them to work out how to send a new one out through the layers of PO and ordering politics which are responsible for the account with Dell in the first place. That is 5 days of bliss where you can't do ANYTHING because of the vicious corporate security policy so you sleep for 5 days, catch up on friends, be a human again.
I love Dell. I don't want a ThinkPad.
But I own a MacBook for my own use.
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.
Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I wouldn't just approve an individual Copilot subscription either. The problem isn't the money, it's the copyright and whether trade secrets are being leaked. Those things can surely be solved, but it's far from trivial.
"We can't just give some unknown company our data!" screeched management.
"You already have."
It's pretty much like all enterprise software: you sell to the people with the purchasing authority. Meaning sales are often closed on the golf course.
...and get terrible solutions which the people on the golf course don't care about since they don't use them - or if they do they only use the reporting part of the feature set - so that's got to be great but the rest can be shit.