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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #122
al_borland wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

IT is a cost center so management geduces their budget as much as they think they dare. When IT struggles to afford a good backu, system they can't afford to figure how to support whatever tool will help you.

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by ghnws »

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.

My current company just has a few HR type people that take care of purchases like that. I literally email them a link to hardware or software I need and they get it delivered to me. This is the best way I've seen it done. I don't have to know anything about the order/deliver process the company uses.

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

#143

Post by lolinder »

netman21 wrote: post #140
jt2190 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … claim it on tax. How does a U.S. employee (exempt, W2 form) do this?

If you qualify for itemized deductions, which you do if you have a mortgage, you can claim things you need for professional development, etc. Subscriptions are a good catch-all. The IRS meant magazine subscriptions, but...

Only a few categories of people get to claim professional development expenses as a tax deduction [0], mostly self-employed.

> If you qualify for itemized deductions, which you do if you have a mortgage

If you have a sufficiently large and expensive mortgage and/or are filing as an individual. Our interest almost got us over the standard deduction in the first year, but every year since then the standard deduction threshold just gets further and further away.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc513

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

#144

Post by RyanHamilton »

vinay_ys wrote: post #136

I've been a decision maker on $100M+ of engineering hardware/software/services spend per quarter and here's my perspective on this problem: 1. If you are making developer tools, make sure current/existing developers find it super useful and are strong advocates for your tool. 2. Make sure you don't tick any of the 'veto' boxes – there are a few – opaque contracts, lockins, data security/privacy challenges, sso/auth i…

Thank you. I know enough to appreciate that list was built on some hard lessons.

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

#146

Post by heelix »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #75

Ha. I used to work in a sales-oriented subsidiary of an engineering company. 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 tenu…

So much this. At one of the big tech companies, we needed a hard drive for something. It was going to be easier to buy a $5K drive array and shuck the drives than expense $200 on a single HDD. Trying to buy stuff 'outside your lane' was crazy.

Just got done with an experience where the company I'm at said - you have a corp card - use it - with the EVPs signing off on whatever for that event. Very much not the norm, but it was eye opening that they knew sometimes the red tape needed to be cut. I'm totally expecting to fight with accounting on a simple taxi receipt because it did not say where the pickup/destination was for a $20 fare the next time I do a 'normal' expense.

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

#147

Post by initplus »

sys_64738 wrote: post #138
cjk2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate life... 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 l…

Companies like Dell hit every market segment from 150$ crap laptops through 4 hour on-site service support. It's all down to the support contract your organization has and which product segment they're buying from.

Anecdata yada yada, but both colleagues of mine with a Dell XPS had trouble with them. This is Dell's top of the line productivity laptop segment. Yeah we got top of the line service. But the damn things still broke down in the first place. Critically, I recall one of them blue screened in the middle of some important infra changes and triggered an outage...

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

#148

Post by cjk2 »

initplus wrote: post #147
sys_64738 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like Dell hit every market segment from 150$ crap laptops through 4 hour on-site service support. It's all down to the support contract your organization has and which product segment they're buying from.

Anecdata yada yada, but both colleagues of mine with a Dell XPS had trouble with them. This is Dell's top of the line productivity laptop segment. Yeah we got top of the line service. But the damn things still broke down in the first place. Critically, I recall one of them blue screened in the middle of some important infra changes and triggered an outage...

Same story with Precision and XPS. $3k laptops last 9 months if you're lucky. I literally have a pile of dead ones now. They don't even bother with servicing them.

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

#149

Post by throwaway11460 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #79
atq2119 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every company I know that balked at using the "enterprise" version of either an OpenAI product or the equivalent Azure Open AI service already uses Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure DevOps, and Azure itself. "We can't just give some unknown company our data!" screeched management. "You already have."

Some of the data is covered by the data protection and SLA agreement the company signed. Some of it is not.

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

#150

Post by youngtaff »

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…

> I purchase my own software licences and claim it on tax

In theory you could do this via the UK tax system too – there’s a field on the Self Assessment forms that allows you to claim work related expenses that weren't reimbursed by your employer

One of my past employers paid a reduced mileage rate so I used to claim the difference on my tax return.

Quite how it would work for software I’m not sure though i.e. what’s the test for a permissible expense

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