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Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Jetbrains is the exception, not the norm. Developer tools are loss leaders for large corporati

Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Jetbrains is the exception, not the norm. Developer tools are loss leaders for large corporation to acquire developer goodwill and mindshare. Previously we sold developer tools/PaaS. Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. You have to sell to management, and when your target is management, then the metrics are completely different from what developers want. This is why no-code and low code are so much more successful than developers tooling startups in terms of revenue and profitability. The people using are the same people who are running the business. The value proposition is clear. "Better developer experience" alone is not sufficient for selling to enterprise. And programmer productivity cannot be quantified in lines of code written. This is hard point to explain and get across on HN because this forum is inherently dismissive of the value of RPA and RAD software.

donmcronald 6y ago
> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Eventually they’ll have to. Everything is trending to SaaS offerings and eventually we’ll be paying way, way more. The amount of money people spend on SaaS CI blows my mind and if that’s any indication the move to massively over priced SaaS tooling is inevitable.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  I'm not sure I buy this argument. The one group of people who certainly can create good alternatives that don't rely on that lock-in effect are programmers, after all. It's their livelihoods and happiness we're talking about, not to mention often their own pockets feeding the SAAS beast in the case of small businesses and freelancers, so they have a lot of incentives to do exactly that. And there are millions of them, many of whom already contribute freely to projects they find interesting anyway.
- DistressedDrone 6y ago
  SaaS CI is valuable because it's not seen as something a programmer could easily make by themselves, unlike the vast majority of SaaS offerings, a lot of which are more marketing than code (not that that's a bad thing, but don't ask the average programmer how highly they value marketing).
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    May be I'm missing something, but CI looks like the thing that's trivially implemented by a few bash scripts. It won't be as pretty and as reliable compared to battle-tested service, but generally it'll work. I did that in the past and it worked pretty well for our uses.
    - hrktb 6y ago
      The most valuable part of CI where I work right now is it being run on a reference setup, with persisted builds and logs attached to each merge requests. We are all supposed to run tests, coverage and benchmarking localy. The point in CI is to guarantee nobody cut corners and keep verifiable proof of good builds. We could fulfil the same requirements with a hand made setup on a box somewhere uploading subsequent artefacts, but I am not sure we would be happier on any specific aspect. Even cost wise, setup and maintenance could non trivial compared to the amounts we're paying now.
    - johannes1234321 6y ago
      A few bash scripts work up to some size. For many projects at some time demands increase and you got longer test runs, which eventually require more machines and and different independent build steps (maybe you don't want to build the core libraries which are rarely touched for each commit of other parts etc.?) and at some point it breaks apart and you need something "proper" especially if you then also want to integrate test results with code review and track them from the single planning tool.
- novok 6y ago
  The pricing of SaaS CI or any kind of advanced server infrastructure is engineering salaries saved, not raw AWS bills. It's completely B2B software and you could do very, very well with just 1000 corps as your customers.
macjohnmcc 6y ago
yeah nearly every developer I encounter does not want to pay for anything. Yet they love to get paid to program. An odd disconnect there for me.
- infoseek12 6y ago
  Yeah nearly every person I encounter does not want to be eaten. Yet they love to eat. An odd disconnect there for me.
  - jussij 6y ago
    Your analogy only works for people who are cannibals.
    - overtomanu 6y ago
      Works for non vegetarians
      - usrnm 6y ago
        I'm not entirely sure plants want to be eaten either
- DistressedDrone 6y ago
  I don't see it as a disconnect, my baker friends seldom buy bread and I suspect jewelers seldom buy jewelry for example. Why buy when you can make?
  - sxg 6y ago
    Because you can’t make every tool you’ll need to program effectively. Unlike bread, which only takes hours to make, good tooling will take months to years if done yourself.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
pjmlp 6y ago
Which is why I grew disappointed with FOSS and decided I was happier working for the enterprise overlords, where such tools are common. It is incredible how so many devs don't want to pay for tooling, yet expect people to pay them. Here is an idea, what about being paid in the exact amount that one is willing to pay for their tooling.
- ris 6y ago
  > Here is an idea, what about being paid in the exact amount that one is willing to pay for their tooling. A better idea: what if all companies had to pay for all the software they expect to make money using, right down to the metal? No leeching off linux for you. Also no gcc, llvm, postgresql, mysql, python, ruby... When people try introducing proprietary software into the FOSS ecosystem, I find it equally "incredible" how little they acknowledge that most of their piddly 10k lines of "magic" depends on the tens of millions of lines of code underneath being written by people who decided to take the other path. It sounds like you're better off out of FOSS, but I can guarantee your job is propped up by its existence, almost no matter what you do.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    My dear, that was exactly what used to be when I started programming. Plenty of successful companies used to live from selling all the stack. In fact GCC only picked up steam the day Sun decided to start charging for the Solaris C compiler. Thankfully the GPL hate crowd, by pushing MIT/BSD licenses has just brought us the future that will be the reinvention of the public domain and shareware of the 80's.
    - dvdkon 6y ago
      Computer systems have gotten much more complicated. The closest you can get to the "full stack" ideal is probably Microsoft, and even they've given up on maintaining a web browser. Full-stack worked for a while, but nowadays you'd need to be a goliath. You can't even pay for all the components you use, since many parts of today's critical infrastructure are community projects with no corporate backing.
maxrev17 6y ago
Developers are a tough market (I am one). They're also a pain to manage, expensive, and still human(ish - if you're lucky) :p, with all the ego and mistakes that come with the territory. No-code for simple wiring/boilerplating once good enough/widely adopted enough, will kick our asses. But then again on the opposite side, in many cases business types bring mainly money to the table, leaving the expensive nerds to do the rest, and have fun with their RG machines in the process.
- DistressedDrone 6y ago
  > No-code for simple wiring/boilerplating once good enough/widely adopted enough, will kick our asses. By "our asses" I assume you mean programmers'? I don't buy it. People think coding is hard because they think thinking is hard. No-code doesn't remove the latter part, it'll only make things easier for programmers. If anything it makes getting into programming easier, but that means more programmers not fewer.
  - NateEag 6y ago
    Do not forget the possibility that no-code systems will result in a worse outcome but still technically get the job done, with a lot less sum total thinking required. Most software is plumbing, not competitive advantage, so it doesn't really matter how good it is if it technically works. If you doubt that, I point you to the world of enterprise software, where terrible software flourishes and thrives. I will not be at all surprised if no-code systems eat the bottom of the software market, replacing many software developer jobs.
- jude- 6y ago
  The history of abstracting the hardware as something easier for people to understand is exactly the history of programming languages. Wake me up when someone writes a compiler that reliably turns "Hello computer, please make me money" into an executable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
MattGaiser 6y ago
> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Because it is too much work to convince the company that spending $500 on JRebel to have me not go on Hacker News for 5 (and it turns into 15) minutes while the thing compiles (my last company). I also have no real stake in whether the product ships in one month or two so I am not paying for it myself. To pay for tooling, productivity needs to be a priority. I have never worked anywhere where productivity was discussed.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  Some companies will care. Some won't. I mentioned something like this to mine and they upgraded the build server in response. For Jetbrains products, if you enjoy them you can use your personal license commercially. Your company just can't pay for it or reimburse you for it. This is the route I go because I use their products for personal projects too. For me it's a no brainer at $150/year for their all-products option (...for the 3rd year, 1st is $250, 2nd is $200).
  - XorNot 6y ago
    I do this as well - its pretty easy to justify a Jetbrains Ultimate subscription for myself since it makes life so much easier.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    That is all way too much money. If they want more adoption, they need to be under the $100 mark.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      That's the price for an all you can code subscription to everything. Individual licenses are much cheaper.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      $150/year is too much for developers who earn $100k+/year? I guess you proved the original point of this thread.
emrah 6y ago
> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Maybe not for their personal/hobby projects, but they wouldn't be the ones paying for tools at work. So it's the companies not willing to pay for dev tools or understand the value they can provide
- randomdata 6y ago
  Companies are made up of people. The only people who might understand the value that they can provide are the programmers, but the programmers are not familiar with the tools because they don't want to pay for them in their personal/hobby projects.
  - emrah 6y ago
    One would hope they would provide some kind of "community" version which I believe is pretty much a must these days to gain any traction
dlojudice 6y ago
> Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Interesting... But monetization might not be the root of this since we have very sophisticated tools delivered as open source. The question then would be why the "dev comunity" is not interested in building tools like those mentioned in the article? My guess is that tools like Reflexion Models doesn't ring any bells for junior/mid-level developers. They don't know exactly what to optimize when it comes to long-term maintenance. That's why we have so many parsers, linters, etc. and now typed languages (again!) and not Reflexion Models. The other day I was looking for something similar to Reflexion Models: a tool that I could describe high level modules and its files (like a package), describe the dependency hierarchy between then and check if there is any calls between modules that break the hierarchy. For instance: getting a alert if there is a call to a repository from the a controller (DDD). It's a common problem for big teams with junior developers that could be solved by automation.
- kungito 6y ago
  Senior developers with 20 years of experience do not "believe" in debuggers, IDEs or writing tests. Same things are reinvented every 3 months with a new name written in a custom font. We are in many ways still in the bronze age of software development.
  - GiorgioG 6y ago
    > Senior developers with 20 years of experience do not "believe" in debuggers, IDEs or writing tests. Speak for yourself. I've been paying for my own developer tooling for 25+ years.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      What do you find to be worth purchasing?
      - GiorgioG 6y ago
        Off the top of my head: - The JetBrains suite of tools (Rider, CLion, DataGrip, Webstorm) - Sublime Text - Prior to offering Visual Studio Community Edition, I used to pay for MSDN if my employer didn’t supply it. - Beyond Compare - Recently paid for Tabnine Pro, the jury is still out if this is worth it.
initplus 6y ago
Charging for developer tooling is really hard. Over-monetizing their dev tooling was a significant contributor to Microsoft's loss of dev mind-share over the last decade. Free software took over the world because any kid in their bedroom could download Linux/GCC/MySQL for free. Want to work in .NET/MSVC? You just run into barriers (gimped "express" versions, no free documentation etc.) Yes this has changed now, but it's been a long time coming.
- jdsully 6y ago
  Not sure what you mean by “no free documentation” but even when I worked there we just used MSDN’s free online website like everyone else. VS did cost $$ but not sure it was overpriced, I’m still less productive on Linux than I was with the real VS (code is nice but not the same). I’d pay for a Linux version in a heartbeat. The real reason Linux took over is Windows just didn’t make a good server. Even if you looked past the bloated footprint, licensing was a nightmare just to figure out what you needed to buy let alone the licensing costs themselves. Even good dev tools can’t make up for a bad platform.
  - horsemans 6y ago
    I believe by "no free documentation" they are referring to the 90s, where MSDN was a subscription service, hence the "long time coming" comment.
    - dataflow 6y ago
      The comment was about the last decade? Seems kind of irrelevant to bring up an obstacle from the 90s. > Over-monetizing their dev tooling was a significant contributor to Microsoft's loss of dev mind-share over the last decade.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        I don’t know about the author of that quote, but I mentally often think of the 90s as “last decade”
dchichkov 6y ago
There is also no VC money in this. Even mature areas like static code analysis are a dead water. There will be a renaissance in tooling, once AGI is realized ;)
- NateEag 6y ago
  Once AGI is realized, no human developer will ever be paid again. I personally doubt AGI will ever come to exist, but if it does, that's an obvious result that will happen within a few years.
  - klibertp 6y ago
    > Once AGI is realized, no human developer will ever be paid again. Well, we'd be in the boat with teachers, reporters, authors, attorneys, bankers, management, some artists... and a lot more of professions which were done in by AI without a G earlier. Here's to hope it all happens fast and goes straight to UBI worldwide.
jariel 6y ago
Part 1 yes. Part 2 ... no. 'No Code' generally have a different use case. For every 'software project' there are probably 5x as many 'simpler projects' that require a basic front/backend but not much material CS knowledge, and that's where no-code shines. 'No Code' should be a euphemism for 'Didn't Need Code In The First Place'. In other words, there's a legit level of abstraction there with it's own world of tooling etc.. Edit: I will double-down and say that within 5-7 tears, the number of 'no code' projects will be greater in number than the number of 'code' projects [1]. 'WordPress' is the original foray into this: people want to make simple sites, they don't want to have to deal with tons of tech. Shopify, is a kind of ultra 'no code' solution - arguably it's a service not a 'no code' solution but it exemplifies the potentiality of entities wanting to solve problems while not getting lost in the hey. [1] https://airdev.co/post/how-no-code-changed-in-2020-and-whats-coming-in-2021 https://airdev.co/post/how-no-code-changed-in-2020-and-whats...
elorant 6y ago
I've paid thousands through the years to buy various versions of Visual Studio. While there are free alternatives I don't even bother paying the money because of the value that beautiful piece of software offers me.
devoutsalsa 6y ago
I remember going to a sales pitch for proprietary mobile app automated testing software . I was the developer looking at this product. It had crap documentation, it was hard to use, and our mobile app was not designed to be testable. But internal efforts to improve the speed at which QA happened were slow. Even though this software was crap, management bought it because it was a problem they could through money at to try and buy their way out of not listening to developers. We wanted to make the app testable and use free, open source tools that would actually work.
amelius 6y ago
What developers want most is a way to market their work, see app stores. Developers are willing to pay up to 30% of their revenue.
- astrange 6y ago
  Even the hosting and download function of app stores is valuable. It replaces auto update frameworks embedded in the app and earlier download sites were all super suspicious and full of ads with fake download buttons. Even Sourceforge started out good, then sold to someone who put adware in the downloads - although it's back to good now.
panny 6y ago
>Jetbrains is the exception, not the norm. Developer tools are loss leaders for large corporation to acquire developer goodwill and mindshare. Previously we sold developer tools/PaaS. Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. It's really funny to me that this is the top comment, because one of the reasons I use Eclipse instead of Jetbrains is due to the tool mentioned directly in the article, Mylyn. Any time I mention it, programmers always respond with, "Huh? What's that?" I choose Eclipse over Jetbrains, not because Jetbrains costs money, but because Jetbrains is not as feature rich. Eclipse is more capable than Intellij Idea at any price.
- techdragon 6y ago
  More capable perhaps, but I’ll take software I can use over Eclipse any day. I repeatedly get pushed towards eclipse for a number of different things all the time and every year I give it a shot because I know things can change over time... and every year I walk away deeply frustrated and spend another year throwing anything that requires working with eclipse based tools, strait into my mental trash bin.
amelius 6y ago
> Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Apparently it is possible make $100k with an IDE color scheme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989
zarkov99 6y ago
I don't think you have this right. The problem is not paying for developer tools, the problem is investing your time in proprietary solutions that might go away any time. For a long and resilient career developers have to stick to tools and technologies that are not dependent on ephemeral corporate support.
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  this exactly. I'm fine to pay for tools (and I do). But I hate the idea of becoming dependent on proprietary tools. Imagine leaving your job and going to the next and because they don't pay for a tool you've become critically dependent on half your skills are useless. And its not just for myself but I think its harmful that it creates barriers within teams and organisations. All the investment in infrastructure and knowledge connected to the tooling can only be shared with the people licensed to use it. If your team processes depend on it then nobody outside the team can even properly work on the software. So we end up in a catch 22 where I will say, we can pay for software as long it is still perfectly practical to develop our code without it. But if you extrapolate from that, it means nothing we ever pay for can have a very high value proposition, and ergo we can't justify paying for it.
  - galaxyLogic 6y ago
    That is my feeling as well I never wanted to become dependent on tools. Right now I use WebStorm and I'm happy paying for it. But I don't really have dependency on it, I could easily switch to VSCode but I think I am happier with WebStorm. The issue is it took me long time to learn how to use WebStorm effectively. That is now a good reason for me to stay with it.
    - katbyte 6y ago
      I get the all tools pack from jetbrains and every time I’ve switched languages they have an ide that’s basically the same for it - it’s fantastic
  - fendy3002 6y ago
    AFAIK this is why Microsoft let windows and excel be pirated for personal use up to certain level. Proprietary tools is worse for developers / companies that develop with many languages and / or other toolings (unless it doesn't interferes with the process itself).
RangerScience 6y ago
There's a big difference between paying for the required tools for a technology and the bonus tools. Java's basically impossible without an intelligent IDE, and C++ isn't far behind. But Ruby/JS/Python? You're just fine with VIM+Tree (if that). Then you can upgrade with Sublime (or the like), and things like Visual Assist (by Whole Tomato) which made a huuuge difference in my first job.
hinkley 6y ago
I went to work at a place that made a code obfuscator, thinking I’d get to work on it. By the time I arrived they were essentially EOLing it (providing support, spending nothing on sales and no new development), so they assigned me to something completely different. JetBrains and Atlassian really are the exceptions.
peterkelly 6y ago
> This is why no-code and low code are so much more successful than developers tooling startups in terms of revenue and profitability These are developer tools though, just marketed differently. "No-code" and "low code" are simply fancy terms for high level languages, and the developers in this case are people without little or no experience in traditional programming languages.
nhlx2 6y ago
What is repl.it’s monetization strategy?
- nhlx2 6y ago
  Hosting, I guess.
hyperpallium2 6y ago
Yes, developers are in the way. A selling point of SQL was management could use it directly for analysis; and spreadsheets were a kind of no-code solution. Yet developers were still needed. Wikipedia's description of RPA suggests something somewhere has gone terribly wrong: RPA systems develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and then perform the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI. Not analogous, but reminds me of The Feeling of Power (Isaac Asimov) https://archive.org/stream/TheFeelingOfPower/The+Feeling+of+Power_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/TheFeelingOfPower/The+Feeling+of+...
raghuveerdotnet 6y ago
Such an important point that. I would just add that the lack of enthusiasm for paid tools I think is because of the lack of significant developments in the space itself. The fact that we can still use clis and 40 year old tools like Emacs without losing much on the benefits of the modern day tooling system says everything one would need to know. And I don't mean it in a degrading way, but there needs to be a paradigm shift from the HCI side. You can't just throw in a debugger, syntax highlighter, linter, and expect people to pay for it; when I can do all of that and more on Emacs with probably a weekends worth of tinkering.
29athrowaway 6y ago
I have a personal JetBrains subscription which I use for my personal projects as well as work projects. Their EULA doesn't restrict this. I see it as a very well justified use of my money.
dehrmann 6y ago
> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. I can't count how many times I see someone using Sublime Text professionally who hasn't paid for it. If anyone should have empathy for a developer, it's a developer, likewise with someone who can afford it. Once I put this together, I realized developer tools are for the most part a business dead end.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  One of the minority of people who paid for their Sublime Text (and soon Sublime Merge) licences, checking in.
mjomaa 6y ago
Yeah I was working on a diagram software [1] that looked similar to VS Code and can be extended easily. Applied to YCombinator but they didn't think it's worth it, so . [1] This was the Angular+Electron version (ported to React afterwards) with the Visio logo: https://imgur.com/a/UDkitDm https://imgur.com/a/UDkitDm
- mjomaa 6y ago
  Ah seems Hacker News removes emojis. After "so" was supposed to be a shrug emoji.
  - hypermachine 6y ago
    They accepted Dendron, conceptually similar. Try again!
thomastjeffery 6y ago
> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Programmers definitely don't want to pay for tooling they haven't used yet. Of course, once they have found a free way to use a tool, they aren't likely to go back and pay for what they already have. One of the biggest things that turns programmers away from tooling is UI/UX. Every programmer is particular about the way they interface with their tooling. The less familiar a tool is, the steeper its learning curve. The more simplified a tool is, the less powerful its abstractions are. UI/UX norms for tooling need to be rethought. Trying to make a tool appeal to a wider audience of programmers is extremely difficult because every tool has baked-in assumptions about how it will be used. Ubiquitously popular tooling tends to be extremely configurable and extremely malleable. The more control the user has over a tool, the more useful it will be to them, and the more interested they will be in using it. There's a reason the shell hasn't died yet. Even with a long list of gotchas and decades of cruft, shells allow users to personalize them to an attractive extreme. The same goes for Vim/Emacs.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  > Ubiquitously popular tooling tends to be extremely configurable and extremely malleable. The more control the user has over a tool, the more useful it will be to them, and the more interested they will be in using it. I disagree; if the workflow and UI offered by the platform is good, I don't need to change it. Case in point is xcode, it's very opinionated in how people work with it, but it works.
  - jdbernard 6y ago
    I don't feel like Xcode is a good example of developer tooling ubiquitously popular because of developer preference. If you want to develop for iOS it's a requirement.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I dunno; there's a lot of SaaS that are in daily use by developers; build tooling, version control, code reviews, chat / collaboration tools, etc. Editors not so much anymore, but I've got an intellij license which I use intensely. I mean I get where you're coming from; for solo developers and small clubs, free tools get you very far. But at larger enterprises you'll want to pay for the extra services and less management.
chmod775 6y ago
Selling software to software developers is a bit like trying to sell shoes to shoemakers. Your shoe needs to be pretty damn amazing to pull that off. There's a reason 98% of popular developer tools are FOSS projects.
tomjen3 6y ago
I disagree that developers don't like to pay for their tooling, I think the issue is that fewer people will be using the tools if they are not free and that means that languages that are bound up to expensive tools (e.g Delphi) are going to lose the network effects other languages gets. Thus even if the language itself is inferior, that will be made up for by the much larger number of people who can create libraries and tools and answer stackoverflow questions. Note that there is a free IDE for all the languages Jetbrains makes IDEs for.
mimixco 6y ago
Depends on what you call tooling. Aren't all the SaaS services needed for modern dev part of tooling? Most companies pay for that stuff. Could be Digital Ocean, GitHub, Auth0, Chargify... To me, those are all dev tools because they do stuff I don't have to do manually, just like an IDE is a dev tool that's more powerful than notepad. They're not standalone services because they don't do anything without me configuring them. And they're really only useful for devs, not anyone else. Digital Ocean is, to me, a great dev toolbox and keeps me from wasting time setting up machines, IPs, etc. We gladly pay for it. Even tools like Notion are really dev tools just deployed as SaaS. I think dev tooling has just moved into SaaS and probably gotten more profitable, if anything.
arthur_sav 6y ago
There are plenty of profitable developer tools out there. I usually encounter 2 issues when evaluating a dev tool: 1) Complexity & bad UI/UX. It's often not clear what i'm buying or all the features are hidden "under the hood". Many devs don't understand that user experience matters, even if the users are also devs. 2) Trust. This also ties to the first point, i need to have a clear picture of what this thing you're selling me does. I don't trust someone else generating code for me, i don't trust magic solutions and i don't trust tools that look like they were built in the 90s. I think there are plenty of opportunities for more developer tools but unfortunately it takes a unique kind of dev to build a product + engineer a marketable solution.
musicale 6y ago
> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling Turbo Pascal and Think C enjoyed some success in the 1980s and 1990s. Then again it looks like those environments were simpler, more responsive, and more enjoyable to use compared to the clunky modern IDEs of the 2020s. (And of course there were fewer free alternatives, and modern apps have to deal with horribly complex APIs, networking, concurrency, distributed systems, etc..)

donmcronald 6y ago

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Eventually they’ll have to. Everything is trending to SaaS offerings and eventually we’ll be paying way, way more. The amount of money people spend on SaaS CI blows my mind and if that’s any indication the move to massively over priced SaaS tooling is inevitable.

Silhouette 6y ago
I'm not sure I buy this argument. The one group of people who certainly can create good alternatives that don't rely on that lock-in effect are programmers, after all. It's their livelihoods and happiness we're talking about, not to mention often their own pockets feeding the SAAS beast in the case of small businesses and freelancers, so they have a lot of incentives to do exactly that. And there are millions of them, many of whom already contribute freely to projects they find interesting anyway.
DistressedDrone 6y ago
SaaS CI is valuable because it's not seen as something a programmer could easily make by themselves, unlike the vast majority of SaaS offerings, a lot of which are more marketing than code (not that that's a bad thing, but don't ask the average programmer how highly they value marketing).
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  May be I'm missing something, but CI looks like the thing that's trivially implemented by a few bash scripts. It won't be as pretty and as reliable compared to battle-tested service, but generally it'll work. I did that in the past and it worked pretty well for our uses.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    The most valuable part of CI where I work right now is it being run on a reference setup, with persisted builds and logs attached to each merge requests. We are all supposed to run tests, coverage and benchmarking localy. The point in CI is to guarantee nobody cut corners and keep verifiable proof of good builds. We could fulfil the same requirements with a hand made setup on a box somewhere uploading subsequent artefacts, but I am not sure we would be happier on any specific aspect. Even cost wise, setup and maintenance could non trivial compared to the amounts we're paying now.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    A few bash scripts work up to some size. For many projects at some time demands increase and you got longer test runs, which eventually require more machines and and different independent build steps (maybe you don't want to build the core libraries which are rarely touched for each commit of other parts etc.?) and at some point it breaks apart and you need something "proper" especially if you then also want to integrate test results with code review and track them from the single planning tool.
novok 6y ago
The pricing of SaaS CI or any kind of advanced server infrastructure is engineering salaries saved, not raw AWS bills. It's completely B2B software and you could do very, very well with just 1000 corps as your customers.

macjohnmcc 6y ago

yeah nearly every developer I encounter does not want to pay for anything. Yet they love to get paid to program. An odd disconnect there for me.

infoseek12 6y ago
Yeah nearly every person I encounter does not want to be eaten. Yet they love to eat. An odd disconnect there for me.
- jussij 6y ago
  Your analogy only works for people who are cannibals.
  - overtomanu 6y ago
    Works for non vegetarians
    - usrnm 6y ago
      I'm not entirely sure plants want to be eaten either
DistressedDrone 6y ago
I don't see it as a disconnect, my baker friends seldom buy bread and I suspect jewelers seldom buy jewelry for example. Why buy when you can make?
- sxg 6y ago
  Because you can’t make every tool you’ll need to program effectively. Unlike bread, which only takes hours to make, good tooling will take months to years if done yourself.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

pjmlp 6y ago

Which is why I grew disappointed with FOSS and decided I was happier working for the enterprise overlords, where such tools are common. It is incredible how so many devs don't want to pay for tooling, yet expect people to pay them. Here is an idea, what about being paid in the exact amount that one is willing to pay for their tooling.

ris 6y ago
> Here is an idea, what about being paid in the exact amount that one is willing to pay for their tooling. A better idea: what if all companies had to pay for all the software they expect to make money using, right down to the metal? No leeching off linux for you. Also no gcc, llvm, postgresql, mysql, python, ruby... When people try introducing proprietary software into the FOSS ecosystem, I find it equally "incredible" how little they acknowledge that most of their piddly 10k lines of "magic" depends on the tens of millions of lines of code underneath being written by people who decided to take the other path. It sounds like you're better off out of FOSS, but I can guarantee your job is propped up by its existence, almost no matter what you do.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  My dear, that was exactly what used to be when I started programming. Plenty of successful companies used to live from selling all the stack. In fact GCC only picked up steam the day Sun decided to start charging for the Solaris C compiler. Thankfully the GPL hate crowd, by pushing MIT/BSD licenses has just brought us the future that will be the reinvention of the public domain and shareware of the 80's.
  - dvdkon 6y ago
    Computer systems have gotten much more complicated. The closest you can get to the "full stack" ideal is probably Microsoft, and even they've given up on maintaining a web browser. Full-stack worked for a while, but nowadays you'd need to be a goliath. You can't even pay for all the components you use, since many parts of today's critical infrastructure are community projects with no corporate backing.

maxrev17 6y ago

Developers are a tough market (I am one). They're also a pain to manage, expensive, and still human(ish - if you're lucky) :p, with all the ego and mistakes that come with the territory. No-code for simple wiring/boilerplating once good enough/widely adopted enough, will kick our asses. But then again on the opposite side, in many cases business types bring mainly money to the table, leaving the expensive nerds to do the rest, and have fun with their RG machines in the process.

DistressedDrone 6y ago
> No-code for simple wiring/boilerplating once good enough/widely adopted enough, will kick our asses. By "our asses" I assume you mean programmers'? I don't buy it. People think coding is hard because they think thinking is hard. No-code doesn't remove the latter part, it'll only make things easier for programmers. If anything it makes getting into programming easier, but that means more programmers not fewer.
- NateEag 6y ago
  Do not forget the possibility that no-code systems will result in a worse outcome but still technically get the job done, with a lot less sum total thinking required. Most software is plumbing, not competitive advantage, so it doesn't really matter how good it is if it technically works. If you doubt that, I point you to the world of enterprise software, where terrible software flourishes and thrives. I will not be at all surprised if no-code systems eat the bottom of the software market, replacing many software developer jobs.
jude- 6y ago
The history of abstracting the hardware as something easier for people to understand is exactly the history of programming languages. Wake me up when someone writes a compiler that reliably turns "Hello computer, please make me money" into an executable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

MattGaiser 6y ago

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Because it is too much work to convince the company that spending $500 on JRebel to have me not go on Hacker News for 5 (and it turns into 15) minutes while the thing compiles (my last company). I also have no real stake in whether the product ships in one month or two so I am not paying for it myself. To pay for tooling, productivity needs to be a priority. I have never worked anywhere where productivity was discussed.

bcrosby95 6y ago
Some companies will care. Some won't. I mentioned something like this to mine and they upgraded the build server in response. For Jetbrains products, if you enjoy them you can use your personal license commercially. Your company just can't pay for it or reimburse you for it. This is the route I go because I use their products for personal projects too. For me it's a no brainer at $150/year for their all-products option (...for the 3rd year, 1st is $250, 2nd is $200).
- XorNot 6y ago
  I do this as well - its pretty easy to justify a Jetbrains Ultimate subscription for myself since it makes life so much easier.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  That is all way too much money. If they want more adoption, they need to be under the $100 mark.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    That's the price for an all you can code subscription to everything. Individual licenses are much cheaper.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    $150/year is too much for developers who earn $100k+/year? I guess you proved the original point of this thread.

emrah 6y ago

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Maybe not for their personal/hobby projects, but they wouldn't be the ones paying for tools at work. So it's the companies not willing to pay for dev tools or understand the value they can provide

randomdata 6y ago
Companies are made up of people. The only people who might understand the value that they can provide are the programmers, but the programmers are not familiar with the tools because they don't want to pay for them in their personal/hobby projects.
- emrah 6y ago
  One would hope they would provide some kind of "community" version which I believe is pretty much a must these days to gain any traction

dlojudice 6y ago

> Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Interesting... But monetization might not be the root of this since we have very sophisticated tools delivered as open source. The question then would be why the "dev comunity" is not interested in building tools like those mentioned in the article? My guess is that tools like Reflexion Models doesn't ring any bells for junior/mid-level developers. They don't know exactly what to optimize when it comes to long-term maintenance. That's why we have so many parsers, linters, etc. and now typed languages (again!) and not Reflexion Models. The other day I was looking for something similar to Reflexion Models: a tool that I could describe high level modules and its files (like a package), describe the dependency hierarchy between then and check if there is any calls between modules that break the hierarchy. For instance: getting a alert if there is a call to a repository from the a controller (DDD). It's a common problem for big teams with junior developers that could be solved by automation.

kungito 6y ago
Senior developers with 20 years of experience do not "believe" in debuggers, IDEs or writing tests. Same things are reinvented every 3 months with a new name written in a custom font. We are in many ways still in the bronze age of software development.
- GiorgioG 6y ago
  > Senior developers with 20 years of experience do not "believe" in debuggers, IDEs or writing tests. Speak for yourself. I've been paying for my own developer tooling for 25+ years.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    What do you find to be worth purchasing?
    - GiorgioG 6y ago
      Off the top of my head: - The JetBrains suite of tools (Rider, CLion, DataGrip, Webstorm) - Sublime Text - Prior to offering Visual Studio Community Edition, I used to pay for MSDN if my employer didn’t supply it. - Beyond Compare - Recently paid for Tabnine Pro, the jury is still out if this is worth it.

initplus 6y ago

Charging for developer tooling is really hard. Over-monetizing their dev tooling was a significant contributor to Microsoft's loss of dev mind-share over the last decade. Free software took over the world because any kid in their bedroom could download Linux/GCC/MySQL for free. Want to work in .NET/MSVC? You just run into barriers (gimped "express" versions, no free documentation etc.) Yes this has changed now, but it's been a long time coming.

jdsully 6y ago
Not sure what you mean by “no free documentation” but even when I worked there we just used MSDN’s free online website like everyone else. VS did cost $$ but not sure it was overpriced, I’m still less productive on Linux than I was with the real VS (code is nice but not the same). I’d pay for a Linux version in a heartbeat. The real reason Linux took over is Windows just didn’t make a good server. Even if you looked past the bloated footprint, licensing was a nightmare just to figure out what you needed to buy let alone the licensing costs themselves. Even good dev tools can’t make up for a bad platform.
- horsemans 6y ago
  I believe by "no free documentation" they are referring to the 90s, where MSDN was a subscription service, hence the "long time coming" comment.
  - dataflow 6y ago
    The comment was about the last decade? Seems kind of irrelevant to bring up an obstacle from the 90s. > Over-monetizing their dev tooling was a significant contributor to Microsoft's loss of dev mind-share over the last decade.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      I don’t know about the author of that quote, but I mentally often think of the 90s as “last decade”

dchichkov 6y ago

There is also no VC money in this. Even mature areas like static code analysis are a dead water. There will be a renaissance in tooling, once AGI is realized ;)

NateEag 6y ago
Once AGI is realized, no human developer will ever be paid again. I personally doubt AGI will ever come to exist, but if it does, that's an obvious result that will happen within a few years.
- klibertp 6y ago
  > Once AGI is realized, no human developer will ever be paid again. Well, we'd be in the boat with teachers, reporters, authors, attorneys, bankers, management, some artists... and a lot more of professions which were done in by AI without a G earlier. Here's to hope it all happens fast and goes straight to UBI worldwide.

jariel 6y ago

Part 1 yes. Part 2 ... no. 'No Code' generally have a different use case. For every 'software project' there are probably 5x as many 'simpler projects' that require a basic front/backend but not much material CS knowledge, and that's where no-code shines. 'No Code' should be a euphemism for 'Didn't Need Code In The First Place'. In other words, there's a legit level of abstraction there with it's own world of tooling etc.. Edit: I will double-down and say that within 5-7 tears, the number of 'no code' projects will be greater in number than the number of 'code' projects [1]. 'WordPress' is the original foray into this: people want to make simple sites, they don't want to have to deal with tons of tech. Shopify, is a kind of ultra 'no code' solution - arguably it's a service not a 'no code' solution but it exemplifies the potentiality of entities wanting to solve problems while not getting lost in the hey. [1] https://airdev.co/post/how-no-code-changed-in-2020-and-whats-coming-in-2021 https://airdev.co/post/how-no-code-changed-in-2020-and-whats...

elorant 6y ago

I've paid thousands through the years to buy various versions of Visual Studio. While there are free alternatives I don't even bother paying the money because of the value that beautiful piece of software offers me.

devoutsalsa 6y ago

I remember going to a sales pitch for proprietary mobile app automated testing software . I was the developer looking at this product. It had crap documentation, it was hard to use, and our mobile app was not designed to be testable. But internal efforts to improve the speed at which QA happened were slow. Even though this software was crap, management bought it because it was a problem they could through money at to try and buy their way out of not listening to developers. We wanted to make the app testable and use free, open source tools that would actually work.

amelius 6y ago

What developers want most is a way to market their work, see app stores. Developers are willing to pay up to 30% of their revenue.

astrange 6y ago
Even the hosting and download function of app stores is valuable. It replaces auto update frameworks embedded in the app and earlier download sites were all super suspicious and full of ads with fake download buttons. Even Sourceforge started out good, then sold to someone who put adware in the downloads - although it's back to good now.

panny 6y ago

>Jetbrains is the exception, not the norm. Developer tools are loss leaders for large corporation to acquire developer goodwill and mindshare. Previously we sold developer tools/PaaS. Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. It's really funny to me that this is the top comment, because one of the reasons I use Eclipse instead of Jetbrains is due to the tool mentioned directly in the article, Mylyn. Any time I mention it, programmers always respond with, "Huh? What's that?" I choose Eclipse over Jetbrains, not because Jetbrains costs money, but because Jetbrains is not as feature rich. Eclipse is more capable than Intellij Idea at any price.

techdragon 6y ago
More capable perhaps, but I’ll take software I can use over Eclipse any day. I repeatedly get pushed towards eclipse for a number of different things all the time and every year I give it a shot because I know things can change over time... and every year I walk away deeply frustrated and spend another year throwing anything that requires working with eclipse based tools, strait into my mental trash bin.

amelius 6y ago

> Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Apparently it is possible make $100k with an IDE color scheme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262989

zarkov99 6y ago

I don't think you have this right. The problem is not paying for developer tools, the problem is investing your time in proprietary solutions that might go away any time. For a long and resilient career developers have to stick to tools and technologies that are not dependent on ephemeral corporate support.

zmmmmm 6y ago
this exactly. I'm fine to pay for tools (and I do). But I hate the idea of becoming dependent on proprietary tools. Imagine leaving your job and going to the next and because they don't pay for a tool you've become critically dependent on half your skills are useless. And its not just for myself but I think its harmful that it creates barriers within teams and organisations. All the investment in infrastructure and knowledge connected to the tooling can only be shared with the people licensed to use it. If your team processes depend on it then nobody outside the team can even properly work on the software. So we end up in a catch 22 where I will say, we can pay for software as long it is still perfectly practical to develop our code without it. But if you extrapolate from that, it means nothing we ever pay for can have a very high value proposition, and ergo we can't justify paying for it.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  That is my feeling as well I never wanted to become dependent on tools. Right now I use WebStorm and I'm happy paying for it. But I don't really have dependency on it, I could easily switch to VSCode but I think I am happier with WebStorm. The issue is it took me long time to learn how to use WebStorm effectively. That is now a good reason for me to stay with it.
  - katbyte 6y ago
    I get the all tools pack from jetbrains and every time I’ve switched languages they have an ide that’s basically the same for it - it’s fantastic
- fendy3002 6y ago
  AFAIK this is why Microsoft let windows and excel be pirated for personal use up to certain level. Proprietary tools is worse for developers / companies that develop with many languages and / or other toolings (unless it doesn't interferes with the process itself).

RangerScience 6y ago

There's a big difference between paying for the required tools for a technology and the bonus tools. Java's basically impossible without an intelligent IDE, and C++ isn't far behind. But Ruby/JS/Python? You're just fine with VIM+Tree (if that). Then you can upgrade with Sublime (or the like), and things like Visual Assist (by Whole Tomato) which made a huuuge difference in my first job.

hinkley 6y ago

I went to work at a place that made a code obfuscator, thinking I’d get to work on it. By the time I arrived they were essentially EOLing it (providing support, spending nothing on sales and no new development), so they assigned me to something completely different. JetBrains and Atlassian really are the exceptions.

peterkelly 6y ago

> This is why no-code and low code are so much more successful than developers tooling startups in terms of revenue and profitability These are developer tools though, just marketed differently. "No-code" and "low code" are simply fancy terms for high level languages, and the developers in this case are people without little or no experience in traditional programming languages.

nhlx2 6y ago

What is repl.it’s monetization strategy?

nhlx2 6y ago
Hosting, I guess.

hyperpallium2 6y ago

Yes, developers are in the way. A selling point of SQL was management could use it directly for analysis; and spreadsheets were a kind of no-code solution. Yet developers were still needed. Wikipedia's description of RPA suggests something somewhere has gone terribly wrong: RPA systems develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and then perform the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI. Not analogous, but reminds me of The Feeling of Power (Isaac Asimov) https://archive.org/stream/TheFeelingOfPower/The+Feeling+of+Power_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/TheFeelingOfPower/The+Feeling+of+...

raghuveerdotnet 6y ago

Such an important point that. I would just add that the lack of enthusiasm for paid tools I think is because of the lack of significant developments in the space itself. The fact that we can still use clis and 40 year old tools like Emacs without losing much on the benefits of the modern day tooling system says everything one would need to know. And I don't mean it in a degrading way, but there needs to be a paradigm shift from the HCI side. You can't just throw in a debugger, syntax highlighter, linter, and expect people to pay for it; when I can do all of that and more on Emacs with probably a weekends worth of tinkering.

29athrowaway 6y ago

I have a personal JetBrains subscription which I use for my personal projects as well as work projects. Their EULA doesn't restrict this. I see it as a very well justified use of my money.

dehrmann 6y ago

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. I can't count how many times I see someone using Sublime Text professionally who hasn't paid for it. If anyone should have empathy for a developer, it's a developer, likewise with someone who can afford it. Once I put this together, I realized developer tools are for the most part a business dead end.

FridgeSeal 6y ago
One of the minority of people who paid for their Sublime Text (and soon Sublime Merge) licences, checking in.

mjomaa 6y ago

Yeah I was working on a diagram software [1] that looked similar to VS Code and can be extended easily. Applied to YCombinator but they didn't think it's worth it, so . [1] This was the Angular+Electron version (ported to React afterwards) with the Visio logo: https://imgur.com/a/UDkitDm https://imgur.com/a/UDkitDm

mjomaa 6y ago
Ah seems Hacker News removes emojis. After "so" was supposed to be a shrug emoji.
- hypermachine 6y ago
  They accepted Dendron, conceptually similar. Try again!

thomastjeffery 6y ago

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Programmers definitely don't want to pay for tooling they haven't used yet. Of course, once they have found a free way to use a tool, they aren't likely to go back and pay for what they already have. One of the biggest things that turns programmers away from tooling is UI/UX. Every programmer is particular about the way they interface with their tooling. The less familiar a tool is, the steeper its learning curve. The more simplified a tool is, the less powerful its abstractions are. UI/UX norms for tooling need to be rethought. Trying to make a tool appeal to a wider audience of programmers is extremely difficult because every tool has baked-in assumptions about how it will be used. Ubiquitously popular tooling tends to be extremely configurable and extremely malleable. The more control the user has over a tool, the more useful it will be to them, and the more interested they will be in using it. There's a reason the shell hasn't died yet. Even with a long list of gotchas and decades of cruft, shells allow users to personalize them to an attractive extreme. The same goes for Vim/Emacs.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
> Ubiquitously popular tooling tends to be extremely configurable and extremely malleable. The more control the user has over a tool, the more useful it will be to them, and the more interested they will be in using it. I disagree; if the workflow and UI offered by the platform is good, I don't need to change it. Case in point is xcode, it's very opinionated in how people work with it, but it works.
- jdbernard 6y ago
  I don't feel like Xcode is a good example of developer tooling ubiquitously popular because of developer preference. If you want to develop for iOS it's a requirement.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I dunno; there's a lot of SaaS that are in daily use by developers; build tooling, version control, code reviews, chat / collaboration tools, etc. Editors not so much anymore, but I've got an intellij license which I use intensely. I mean I get where you're coming from; for solo developers and small clubs, free tools get you very far. But at larger enterprises you'll want to pay for the extra services and less management.

chmod775 6y ago

Selling software to software developers is a bit like trying to sell shoes to shoemakers. Your shoe needs to be pretty damn amazing to pull that off. There's a reason 98% of popular developer tools are FOSS projects.

tomjen3 6y ago

I disagree that developers don't like to pay for their tooling, I think the issue is that fewer people will be using the tools if they are not free and that means that languages that are bound up to expensive tools (e.g Delphi) are going to lose the network effects other languages gets. Thus even if the language itself is inferior, that will be made up for by the much larger number of people who can create libraries and tools and answer stackoverflow questions. Note that there is a free IDE for all the languages Jetbrains makes IDEs for.

mimixco 6y ago

Depends on what you call tooling. Aren't all the SaaS services needed for modern dev part of tooling? Most companies pay for that stuff. Could be Digital Ocean, GitHub, Auth0, Chargify... To me, those are all dev tools because they do stuff I don't have to do manually, just like an IDE is a dev tool that's more powerful than notepad. They're not standalone services because they don't do anything without me configuring them. And they're really only useful for devs, not anyone else. Digital Ocean is, to me, a great dev toolbox and keeps me from wasting time setting up machines, IPs, etc. We gladly pay for it. Even tools like Notion are really dev tools just deployed as SaaS. I think dev tooling has just moved into SaaS and probably gotten more profitable, if anything.

arthur_sav 6y ago

There are plenty of profitable developer tools out there. I usually encounter 2 issues when evaluating a dev tool: 1) Complexity & bad UI/UX. It's often not clear what i'm buying or all the features are hidden "under the hood". Many devs don't understand that user experience matters, even if the users are also devs. 2) Trust. This also ties to the first point, i need to have a clear picture of what this thing you're selling me does. I don't trust someone else generating code for me, i don't trust magic solutions and i don't trust tools that look like they were built in the 90s. I think there are plenty of opportunities for more developer tools but unfortunately it takes a unique kind of dev to build a product + engineer a marketable solution.

musicale 6y ago

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling Turbo Pascal and Think C enjoyed some success in the 1980s and 1990s. Then again it looks like those environments were simpler, more responsive, and more enjoyable to use compared to the clunky modern IDEs of the 2020s. (And of course there were fewer free alternatives, and modern apps have to deal with horribly complex APIs, networking, concurrency, distributed systems, etc..)