101–110 of 189 posts
A good thing in my opinion. 95% of the tools are worthless. In a lot of cases a personal preference of a dev. Not a shared one. And sometimes sold by a sales representative to a dev. Important to have a guarden.
Unless you can put on azure/AWS/Google cloud. I can't buy a pencil without approval, but I can spend thousands in our cloud without asking anyone.
And there's the magic of the Amazon marketplace. Let's you buy non-AWS services while still ending up on the AWS bill and contributing to any potential spending commitment the company has.
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…
Oh no. Excel includes an entire programming language, namely VBA macros and if you give it to engineers they will use it. The reason Excel is ubiquitous is because it is Microsoft and someone is paying. The same is true for Matlab. A company getting Matlab licenses is much, much easier than someone getting a python installation.
It isn't a money problem. It is an Anti-Money prolem. If you can't pay someone you can't use it.
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…
> a huge job to get anything self hosted last IT with their policy of 'we are in charge of the computers and we will decide how you run your business' ... because we are also in charge of: - the bills for the servers/networks/storage to "self host" your new shiny application - the installation/upgrade/administration/support of the servers/networks... and of your application (because the finance department doesn't kno…
My algorithm always started with, can we do this with our existing O365 licence. You can't have Trello or Asana, because we have Planner already. You can't have Slack because we have Teams. You can have Basecamp because the manager put a great case of why She couldn't do that on Teams. You can't have Jira because you only want bug tracking and it is too complex for your little team, how about self-hosted Redmine?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My own stance as a lead is that it costs more than 50€ just discussing the thing, so we might as well just buy it.
50€ can be literally less than 30 minutes of discussion over the item being bought.
At my company, I can buy pretty much anything I want. I do buy hardware often. But software dev tools? I am trying hard to think of one and coming up empty. Save for GitHub/Copilot, ChatGPT and Anthropic subscriptions. Those things are the only software dev tools I have found worth paying for.
There are also examples like Slack where it becomes a ground up movement that eventually results in the company purchasing the requested tool.
(Context: I was the lead engineer on the company emerging technology team, buying 3D printers, VR headsets, and hackathon supplies and many many things of this nature + travel related expenses)
The problem isn't money, you can get money at most companies fairly easily. The problem is that you actually need to be allowed to use it, which is far harder and far more costly than the cost of the product.