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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

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #39

Selling dev-tools to devs is like selling toys to kids - you target the parents (or the paying CxOs in the company). One should learn from the likes of Slack, Postman, etc. -- make it the de-facto tools for the devs/users and make them happy, then they go and ask their parents/approvers to buy them.

That's how you make parents feel good about themselves, that they did something useful, while their kids are unhappy with shit pseudo-toys they got. That's how amateurs and people who mistake priorities in edutainment do things.

Pros know that you always target the kids - not just for toys, but for many other categories of wares too. Kids may have no spending authority, but they're much better at marketing to their parents than you can possibly hope for.

Like, there's a reason you see Paw Patrol merch on every other kid everywhere - they release a highly addictive animated show for kids, and kids do the rest.

The reason this doesn't work with devs is because unlike parents of kids, people with spending authority usually don't care, as devs are a cost centre and a number on a chart, not people generating value.

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

#92

Post by olivierduval »

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.

Actually, it's just considering books, licences and hardware as disposables like pen and papers... and it can usually be true for some "small" local software (like an IDE, provided that either you trust the devs with admin rights or that corp IT can allow software installation). You can give either a "small" bugdet for everybody (and you wont be a software the same year that you buy a new laptop) or managed by the team/department

But it doesn't work when you need corp IT for corp IT integration

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

#93

Post by srvaroa »

A business model based on engineers as the decision makers is perfectly possible. But it is confined to tools where an engineer can make a local optimisation without direct impact beyond that scope. IDEs are the best example. Engs in a company can be allowed to make whatever personal IDE decision that makes each one of them more productive, and the global impact of aggregating those individual decisions will be ok. Jetbrains is a testament to this.

But this is not the same for every tool. The thread author focuses on examples that fall in this second category like Redis, Terraform, AWS, etc. Unlike with IDEs, sprawl resulting from individual decisions in databases, infra management or cloud infra becomes a problem. For both! The company has to maintain a heterogeneous stack. The seller can’t make a meaningful enterprise deal just because some team chose Redis. This means that you will want to do some standardisation. At that point the impact of the choice and the size of the license become big enough that, in the same way as eng leads will want a say, finance will too, for good reason.

And needless to say, the moment finance is in the picture you will have to justify the choice in a language that is challenging for most engineers.

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

#94

Post by jimnotgym »

smdyc1 wrote: post #63
toenail wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er what? https://www.jetbrains.com/business/

It's triple the cost of a single user license for the same thing. Beancounters don't like that.

People don't like that

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

#95

Post by olivierduval »

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" ? ;-)

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

#96

Post by anonymousiam »

Gigachad wrote: post #50
jimnotgym wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Back in the day at Hughes Aircraft, and later, at least for a while, at Boeing, we had a "Library", though which anyone could request a book. If the library did not have it, they would purchase a copy, and "loan" it to the requestor indefinitely. If another request for the same book came in, the original requestor would be asked to "return" it to the library. The library also maintained subscriptions to all relevant technical journals and standards publications.

This system was awesome because book purchases did not require management approval, so there were no denials and little delay involved.

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

#97

Post by jimnotgym »

bartvk wrote: post #37
holoduke wrote: post #31

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.

Important for what reason?

Perhaps because interoperability of a team is more important that one dev?

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

#99

Post by PeterisP »

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.

Sure, but in the parent example it's more like a 2k-3k license, which makes sense only if you're going to use it regularly.
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