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 kickbacks for the purchaser…
Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
151–160 of 189 posts
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#152I 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…
> … claim it on tax. How does a U.S. employee (exempt, W2 form) do this?
You dont (unless you’re 1099)
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#153Earlier 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...
There’s no but - if you do this and get audited, it’s not going to fly
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Dont worry - next year is last year of increased standard deduction =)
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Dont worry - next year is last year of increased standard deduction =)
Won't help now, though, because the amount of interest we pay has gone down and will continue to go down. =)
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This isn't everyone's experience - I've got two precision laptops - they are 12 and 10 years old and have never shown so much as a sniffle of a problem, neither has my Latitude laptop that I lug around for personal use. Maybe I just got lucky ?
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#157As a VP of Sales selling dev tools, I noticed:
1. As mentioned already, if devs aren't already using it, it's an uphill battle to sell.
2. Having your product as OSS helps since it reduces barrier to entry - devs and being using your product without having to contact sales.
3. Large enterprises, e.g., Fortune 500/Global 2000, spend money to reduce risk, cost and improve productivity (and other reasons) - as long as devs will use the tool. Startups, smaller companies would complain about spending even a dollar (probably because so many tools are OSS)
4. Target the centralized dev intra leadership and team would buy and support other dev tools. A junior sales mistake is giving free sales resources (e.g., demos, trial support) to a distributed team or devs trying your product - they probably will never buy since they didn't have authority, and all you did was provide free OSS support to get them running. Coaching sellers to avoid this is key - steer these types to docs and community.
5. Sell the value of support. Sales will only help if speaking with a qualified opportunity with authority and budget - otherwise good luck in the docs and community. In large enterprises, that is not a strategy.
6. And to the sea of sellers who think they can cram down large contracts - get the initial pilot or purchase successful - help demonstrate metrics of its value - .e.g. productivity etc. and put it in an easy-to-consume way for real decision makers to understand. Then you are more likely to take down larger investments. And yes - even before that initial deal, explain a license model and examples of how this scales to be affordable and not linear. You look like the JV squad if you do otherwise and will not know why they stopped returning your calls. You get one chance to make a viable economic impression if deployed site-wide. Unless you work at massive software companies where you can cram down large purchases due to enterprise agreement quirks and holding customers hostage to agree to software they may or may not use. e.g., company heavily uses one product so vendor stuffs other products in the renewal.
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#158I 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've been doing the same things for many years at this point
Most companies refuse to buy the right software for the job and, like you, I'm the most effective person in my team since I can do things quickly and effectively unlike anyone else
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#159I've been trying to get Excalidraw+ for my team since October. It's 8€/month/user.
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#160No, engineers are full of hubris, and arent rewarded fro bringing value to the company. They are rewarded for "solving problems" as in figuring out puzzles. Buying software isnt a puzzle to solve its just busy work.
They look at a saas product and think "i could build that" and they might be right. But the current engineering culture doesnt look at that situation and go "why the frick would you want to?!?!"