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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

#111

Post by School-Cotton »

pflenker wrote: post #48
genocidicbunny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

IDA costs thousands of dollars per seat

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

#112

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #81
tw04 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I have been on the senior management team of several companies and have worked with sales. Your lazy stereotype is as bad a suggesting programmers all sit in dark rooms with starwars T shirts and Body Odour issues. I have seen sales people create very complex excel models, and use low code tools to build their own pipelines because corporate IT were too pig ignorant to help them. I have seen them use screen recor…

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

#113

Post by Ekaros »

VS1999 wrote: post #22
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‘…

How does anything think setting up a system where you can get billed for clicking a link is a good idea? Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card. The whole setup is beyond ridiculous, and it's hard to believe this is how "devs having no purchase authority stories usually start".

Aren't this sort of dark patterns exactly what are expected from growth hacking and getting numbers look good? Whole sub-set of companies are incentivised to use these tactics...

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

#114

Post by itsArtur »

bjt12345 wrote: post #86

I purchase my own software licences and claim it on tax. Because it's a false economy. I've won awards at work, became indispensable on certain projects, and have been given pay rises, choose the work I want to do, through finding the affordable right tools for the job and purchasing them. My Jetbrains licenses are a classic example of this. I couldn't imagine refractoring code without it. If the cost cutting stopped…

im curious - what are some other examples?

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

#115

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

redditor98654 wrote: post #67
kmac_ wrote: post #40

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?

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

#116

Post by al_borland »

jimnotgym wrote: post #81
tw04 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I have been on the senior management team of several companies and have worked with sales. Your lazy stereotype is as bad a suggesting programmers all sit in dark rooms with starwars T shirts and Body Odour issues. I have seen sales people create very complex excel models, and use low code tools to build their own pipelines because corporate IT were too pig ignorant to help them. I have seen them use screen recor…

> because corporate IT were too pig ignorant to help them

Is corporate IT the issue here, or is it that companies aren’t setup in a way for random teams to dedicate time to build and support things for other random teams? The people in corp IT have jobs and deliverables, and none of them are building tools for the sales team.

I wouldn’t expect corp IT to build things for the sales team, anymore than I’d expect the sales team to help corp IT with selling a tool they want to upper management or the rest of the company.

If the sales team needs internal tools, then they need a dedicated dev team to work on those tools. Short of that, they will be stuck doing it themselves with whatever skill sets happen to be on the team at the time.

In my experience, this is not just an issue with the business vs IT. Even within IT, if a team of sys admins needs some tools, they will have to cobble something together the best they can, because there isn’t another team that will do it for them. Once or twice I see where a team with some skills needs some work and starts making offers to help other teams… one team ends up taking all their cycles, then down the road, it’s realized they don’t have a “real” role at the company, so the whole team is laid off, then the team still using their tools is left scrambling to find a replacement that can be supported.

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

#117

Post by cm2187 »

jsdwarf wrote: post #89
tw04 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excel is so ubiquitous because it is the only IDE/Programming Language/Database Environment business users can run in a restricted corporate IT environment.

And the self service coding platforms I have seen provided by corporate IT are wonderfully inadequate and useless. Corporate IT looks at the average business user who admittedly can't code even if their life depended on it and thinks "that's my client". Except that 99% of the end user automation is done by the 5th percentile of business users (the "spreadsheet monkey" of the team, I was proudly one!), those are their real client, and they are way more sophisticated, and that's only increasing as kids pretty much all get exposed to coding in school and college.

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

#118

Post by [deleted] »

maccard wrote: post #55
VS1999 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does anything think setting up a system where you can get billed for clicking a link is a good idea? Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card. The whole setup is beyond ridiculous, and it's hard to believe this is how "devs having no purchase authority stories usually start".

I work in a small company and we use a few services that bill for active users, and sync with g suite. It reduces the overhead of admin for me significantly as it means I know we're only paying for people who use the service that month. > Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card. A £1000 limit doesn't stop you from generating a £10000 invoice. It just means you need to go higher with your tail between…

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by toenail »

pompino wrote: post #17
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.

The individuals decide what matters to them. If the company thinks their employees are too incompetent to know what they need it's time to move on.

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

#120

Post by al_borland »

olivierduval wrote: post #95
delichon wrote: post #19

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.

How much time before you boss says: "OK, during the last 3 months you told me that all these tool would save you in total 1 dev/year... so I will reduce your team by 1 dev but keep the work and deadlines" ? ;-)

I had this happen. I was on a team that was overloaded by work generated by another team, that had the tools and capabilities to automate the work, but chose not to, because they didn’t have to deal with it. Spending time on their work meant other important tasks went undone, or were half assed.

I pulled some data and did some math, and found that we could dedicate 3 people full-time just to working on their junk. My goal with this was to light a fire under them, get that stuff automated, and free up those hours so those people could do more interesting and worthwhile work.

It did light a fire, the stuff did get automated, and the week after victory was declared, 3 people were laid off. I was very upset and yelled at my boss a lot. It sent a very clear message to everyone on the team that automation is the enemy and when they see something they can/should be improved, they’d be smart to keep their mouth shut. That’s exactly what happened. Improvement efforts ground to a halt, as no one would talk about issues or use new tools that were developed.

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