How do you convince your bosses to cough it up for the right toolset (whatever that is on your team)? Whether it's an IDE, refactoring, unit testing framework, build server, or whatever else?
What has worked?
Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#2I don't work at places that aren't already coughing up for the right tools. Literally. I have declined jobs because of this and would leave my current employer if this happened.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#3Nothing.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#4Arguing that they'll get a decent return on investment. If your boss can't see that a £x outlay now will mean n * £x savings in improved efficiencies during a given period, you'll probably end up leaving to work for somebody who does! I know I have.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#5Depends on your position .
I will just tell that my productivity will be decreased if I don't use the one which I believe is best.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#6I don't work at places that aren't already coughing up for the right tools. Literally. I have declined jobs because of this and would leave my current employer if this happened.
In my experience, the best tools are usually free.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#7Depends on your position . I will just tell that my productivity will be decreased if I don't use the one which I believe is best.
Dangerous move. Not to say it isn't worth doing, but I've seen it get highly competent people fired. You need to understand that managerial training and experience turns nice people into suspicious, cynical assholes and that you're in danger of being interpreted as threatening, "I'm going to intentionally slow down if I don't get what I want". It's not what you mean, but it's how it will be read.
Now, career stagnation, which is what you get if you never speak up, is a lot worse than getting fired, which is surprisingly easy to recover from as long as you have the savings. You just have to be aware of the risks of each avenue.
Managers also tend to underappreciate the importance of proper tooling in developer productivity (the commodity developer fallacy) and they tend to view such discussions as "distracting". From their perspective, Java's popularity is a vindication of its value. So many languages and methodologies have been oversold for decades and managers don't know which of these are real (e.g. functional programming, which provides a long-term 2-4x improvement in programmer productivity) and which are bullshit hawked by overpriced consultants.
What I've learned is that it's better to use the best tools anyway, deliver software using them, and use existing accomplishments to make your case. Results talk. It's better to ask forgiveness than permission. If you deliver something awesome that helps the company, people are going to overlook what language you used.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#8Arguing that they'll get a decent return on investment. If your boss can't see that a £x outlay now will mean n * £x savings in improved efficiencies during a given period, you'll probably end up leaving to work for somebody who does! I know I have.
This is right. You always have to argue the business case to management. If you can turn X into a factor of cost, you can sell a lot of things. Even if you think the benefits are obvious to every party involved, you'll still need to stick a dollar value on there. I just recently joined a strategic team to make an improvement that literally everyone knows is a problem, but one of our first things to do is quantify so we can determine the ROI for our efforts.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#9I don't work at places that aren't already coughing up for the right tools. Literally. I have declined jobs because of this and would leave my current employer if this happened.
In my experience, the best tools are usually free.
It's true that sometimes the best tools are free, but there are a lot of organizations where you are not allowed to use even those free tools as they are not approved by some legal or IT department. The fact that those tools are free doesn't make a big difference for BigCo types of organizations.
Re: Ask HN: How do you convince your bosses to use the right tools?
#10Put yourself in your boss' position and imagine he had to turn around and pitch your idea to a VP. What ammo can you give your boss to make that next-level conversation go smoothly? How does this new tool solve some problem the VP has been on your boss to solve?
Mention a competitor or partner company already using this tool successfully. Tell him what business metric will be positively affected by adopting the tool.
Timing can be critical so watch for the perfect moment to pitch your idea -- like ahead of a management meeting where your boss needs to talk up what your group is working doing.
But above all, be honest about the costs, benefits and alternatives. Good luck.