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Musicians and carpenters make far less than programmers, but they still buy their tools. Software people are too entitled. Even if you are not professional, yo
by sriram_malhar 4y ago
Musicians and carpenters make far less than programmers, but they still buy their tools. Software people are too entitled. Even if you are not professional, you can still afford 54c a day ($200 a year). Even a programmer in India can.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoMany junior developers in my city make around $300 a month. After spending $200 on rent and most of the rest on food, you're not left with much. I understand nobody really cares about crap-holes like mine when they're making most of their money in Western Europe and North America, so just throwing it out there.
- pjmlp 4y agoAs highschool student in 80's Portugal, 10 years after 40 years dictatorship and colonial war were behind us, when software was sold as bootleg copies on bazaars, I saved enough money to eventually buy Turbo Pascal for students at 30 000 escudos. As I wanted the real deal and not a bunch of no name floppies with copied manuals. That would be around 150 euros, without taking into account the inflation to modern days. And to place the price in perspective, it was a third of the minimum wage, while the overall cost of my PC took 5 years for my parents to pay back to the bank.
- cosmodisk 4y agoFair enough, but what's the revenue per dev in your org then? Surely it's a bit more than $300/months.
- smeagull 4y agoI'm not paying that much for an editor that runs counter to my muscle memory, just so I can use a different programming language. If a language requires some IDE to make it usable, then I put it in the same camp as Java: Hope the competition are using it.
- KronisLV 4y agoI'm tempted to ask what languages you're using and what has your best experience with them been like. Because as messy as Java is, refactoring codebases in it that have been kept alive for close to a decade is surprisingly not madness-inducing (most of the time), at least in some of the sane frameworks. Apart from, you know, legacy projects basically killing your career in the long term. I'm not sure what other language I'd feel comfortable with changing how some method works across 50 other places that call it and have the IDE do most of the heavy lifting. Yes, I have Stockholm syndrome, probably. Yes, I'd prefer to retire to planting potatoes in a farm, rather than work with NullPointerExceptions.
- pjmlp 4y agoNo wonder FOSS languages are stuck in the pre-historic tooling.
- makeitdouble 4y agoThis is an undue attack. We buy our computers and screens and keyboards, most of us are on commercial OS, we pay for SaaS at a non trivial price, and most of us also use additional personal apps that aren't free (including password managers, mail clients etc.). Those are actual tools for the trade. Arguing we should also buy every Jetbrains product is like arguing carpenters should buy line drawing AR goggles. Perhaps some will see the value in it, but it's far from an noncontroversial POV. If you feel a tool as as much downsides than upsides in your workflow, you don't use it, whatever its price is.
- philliphaydon 4y ago“I’ll pay $1000’s to get all setup and running with everything I need, including a bunch of stuff I don’t need, but not the last $90 for some productive software to make more money” Yeah ok.
- xigoi 4y agoYou forgot the additional $1000 for a computer powerful enough to run JetBrains.
- philliphaydon 4y agoSorry I meant to type $1000’s. Corrected it. I ran JetBrains software on one of those 1.5ghz MacBook 12” and it was totally fine. I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware. Not like visual studio. Now that’s a pain!
- KronisLV 4y ago> I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware. That depends. If you have multiple large projects open at the same time, it'll eat a lot of RAM, even if it won't be too CPU intensive. I run it on a ThinkPad that has 32 GB of RAM, when I have about 6-7 instances of the IDE open and all of these services running locally (generally Java projects, the largest of which is around 4000+ source files), then it gets close to the resource limits.
- sam0x17 4y agoWe pay $3500 every 2 years to have up-to-date hardware
- sam0x17 4y agoAnd if we try to re-sell our equipment to try to recoup some of that cost, best you can get is like 1/4th the original price typically by the time it's time to sell
- philderbeast 4y agoIf you work for a company, in any field, and they don't supply the tools for you to do your job, they are doing them selves a disservice. If you want your employees to be productive, you provide them tools to achieve that, otherwise you get what you pay for. It's the Companies that are acting entitled in this situation, not the workers.
- einpoklum 4y ago1. A Musician has one tool. Ok, maybe a note-stand etc. But in software, there are thousands of "tools" you can buy. 2. Physical tools vs making copies of some bytes. No need to retread this here, but bottom line: Not comparable.
- sriram_malhar 4y agoNo semi-successful professional musician is so bare. Software engineers are not your average starving type of people (unless they are willingly doing intermittent fasting!)
- dizhn 4y agoI wonder if anybody has 'one' guitar. I don't really know anyone who does.
- sangnoir 4y agoHow much would a carpenter pay for a fancy bench top for their workshop? I'm guessing not a lot, since they can make one themselves. Programmers are toolmakers, and are therefore harsh critics of tools they use; just like a carpenter will tell you everything that's wrong with the design, and choice of wood that went into a pricey, but ultimately-affordable-to-a-carpenter bench top. Having access to cheaper, good-enough alternatives is part of it.
- sriram_malhar 4y agoA carpenter is not going to make his/her own table saw. A basic table saw costs $300ish. I'm not writing my own IDE or my own database. I can, and I have, in times past. I do pay for tools that I need.
- sangnoir 4y ago> A carpenter is not going to make his/her own table saw. This is where the analogy breaks down, but they'd likely download a free one made by a consortium of other carpenters, which can be customized to their needs > I do pay for tools that I need. As have I: I was paying JetBrains yearly until they published plans to brick my IDE if I dared stopped sending them money. They walked this back after an uproar - but that episode showed me that I was also playing in their sandbox and subject to their every whim. I now default to using tools that can be forked at a moments notice (by myself or others) Also, JetBrains IDEs were far ahead of the competition back then. For the tech stack and codebases I now work on (or perhaps additional experience?), none of the JetBrains IDEs are worth the effort. vim and a handful of plugins & scripts are adequate 95% of the times, VSCode takes me up to 98%, and it's diminishing returns beyond that