11 ms·

JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant

by mythz 4y ago

JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.

qwerty456127 4y ago
JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.
- lgas 4y ago
  > I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price. To be fair, that's true of almost everything.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Most software sales are more elastic and would sell closer to half the number of units at twice the price, not meaningfully increasing revenue. (This can be good or bad, depending on the industry and the competition.)
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
  - skrtskrt 4y ago
    And the price goes down every year you renew for like four years I think? By year 4 you’re getting the all products pack for like $150/ year
    - geoelectric 4y ago
      Yeah, I jumped in when they first did subs back in 2015 (IIRC). Nowadays, the charge seems pretty trivial for what you get, though I think they may have just raised it on me a little to closer to $175. I also jumped into a personal O'Reilly Safari subscription way back when the price wasn't as high as it is now, and I've kept that grandfathered subscription up as well. I think between the two, it ends up being a bit less than $500 a year. That's not very much at all against a tech salary, and the O'Reilly sub actually has been quietly useful for work projects now and again too. My basic take is 1) A builder should have their own set of tools whether they hew wood or numbers (and not everything fits neatly into Visual Studio Code, though I probably use that as much or more than Jetbrains); and 2) if I ever do manage to squeeze out a profitable side project in CA, I want my argument that I'm not using my employer's resources in any way shape or form to be very very solid. In CA, who owns the resources is the difference in who owns that product. For the same reason, I always buy my own cell phone and pay my own cell phone plan, even if a corporate phone is otherwise forced on me, and always own my own laptop as well for any personal development that comes up. It's a touch on the paranoid side, I guess, but I just feel better knowing I can be as independent as I want to be with my tech stack. With my own tech library to lean on, a nearly universal set of build tools licensed specifically to me, and my own devices for communication and development, I feel very comfortable that there's no implied shared resource argument that can be made.
      - passthejoe 4y ago
        Smart.
- hbn 4y ago
  I'd pay for it if I did enough programming in my day-to-day life that it would justify the cost. But I only occasionally get into the swing of doing a project, and even then I've never made money off of any of them. I still have my university email (graduated in 2020) so I've been renewing my student license that gets me a free license for the occasional times I use them. I kinda wish they'd just go for the Winrar or Docker business model, where it's free for individuals but businesses have to pay up.
dopamean 4y ago
JetBrains IDEs are the only dev tool I pay for as well. I write kotlin professionally and for fun and the Intellij + Kotlin experience is the most I've enjoyed writing code since my early days learning Ruby.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  Kotlin is such a lovely language, and I really like that it was made by JetBrains because that means I can count on a top notch IDE/development experience.
  - jareds 4y ago
    The fact that Kotlin was created by JetBrains and appears to require their IDE to be productive is the reason I have no interest in it. I'm totally blind and while JetBrains IDE's are technically accessible with my screen reading software they are difficult to use unlike VSCode which makes an effort to be plesent to use with screen reader software not just technically possible to use.
    - culi 4y ago
      I've always used VSCode and I really don't see what it is that JetBrains can do that VSC can't. Any time there's a new language I'm picking up I can almost always count on a good extension to provide all the necessary intellisense I need. Good to hear they've done a better job with their screen reader accessibility as well. I learned to use VoiceOver a month ago (I do a lot of front-end dev work) and ever since then I've had a lot of appreciation for any app/site that manages to pull do it well
    - dopamean 4y ago
      Who said that kotlin requires intellij? Not a rhetorical question. I've never heard that claim before. Afaict there's nothing about the language that would make it impossible to use in another ide.
- guytv 4y ago
  This is one point that worries me about Kotlin (which I like a lot). Is it even practical developing in Kotlin using something other than IntelliJ? All of its toolsets come from the same company, which could kill it one day.
BMorearty 4y ago
Agreed. JetBrains and GitHub Copilot are the two exceptions for me as an individual programmer.
- bombolo 4y ago
  > GitHub Copilot are the two exceptions for me as an individual programmer I'm sure your boss will be overjoyed when the company will get hit by a lawsuit :)
  - BMorearty 4y ago
    Oh yes I’m sure my boss is shaking in their boots about being liable for how I spend my own money on my own time for personal projects.
    - bombolo 4y ago
      The entire topic of the discussion was engineers buying their own work tools. You went OT. It happens. No reason to be snarky about it.
      - BMorearty 4y ago
        Disagree. The comment I replied to was about personally paying for tools. My read was that they meant for personal use. And you started the snark, not me.
        culi 4y ago
        regardless I think a point was missed that you might end up pushing up code produced by copilot that could get your company in legal trouble While I think this concern has a lot of merit, I use Copilot a lot almost always just as a fancy autocomplete. I wouldn't ever let it produce a completely new piece of code for me and I imagine most other devs using it have the same practices so this critique never really hit
jve 4y ago
Few times I tried JetBrains rider trial because was fed up with Visual Studio performance issues and occasional crashes. But rider won't even compile my solution OOTB. Meh.
throwaway675309 4y ago
It's completely worth it to me to pay for the entire jetbrains suite annually. I'd say I use DataGrip, Webstorm, and Pycharm on a daily basis.
batushka3 4y ago
- lycopodiopsida 4y ago
  JetBrains is a czech company. And always was, as in "founded in Prague". Stop spreading FUD.
  - somethingreen 4y ago
    Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech? Asking seriously. Because I was a russian speaking Ukrainian until recently and used to listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time, for years, starting back when JB products just started gaining popularity. Not once was the company or it's products regarded as Czech by russians. It was always talked about as russian, all the podcast guests from JB were russian, all the conf speakers were russian. Now, it wouldn't be the first time russians appropriated something that wasn't theirs. Which is why I'm asking if there are actually any signs of JB operating in Czechia outside of company being registered there. All I can find is JetbrainsCZ youtube channel with whopping 44 views on its single office walk video.
    - wasmitnetzen 4y ago
      They say they had three R&D offices (out of 6) in Russia and closed them in March 2022.[1] 131 out of 161 open positions on their career page list Prague as one of the possible locations.[2] [1]: Slide 35: https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/jetbrains/docs/corporate-overview/en-us/jetbrains_corporate_overview.pdf https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/jetbrains/d... [2]: https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/ https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/
    - lycopodiopsida 4y ago
      Why should an multinational IT company aiming at developers talk in a local language? How does a heritage of founders matters? Google is half a russian company by that metric, as in "Sergey Brin". JetBrains is a Czech company because it was created in Czech Republic and is operated from Czech Republic. They've had significant development resources in pre-war Russia, like many big companies, because it was a cheap and good. As the war started, they've rescued whoever they could and closed their russian offices.
worldsayshi 4y ago
I personally pay for Intellij but lately I've found it harder to motivate when vscode provides a very similar experience and especially since Python is supported out of the box for vscode.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  After trying it a bit more I am slightly leaning towards keeping Intellij again. Mostly because of being better at the small things. Like more readable file tree-view and better project search tools.
- xvector 4y ago
  I personally find JetBrains IDEs' capabilities exceed that of VSCode. The IDE just feels better thought out to me. However, the convenience of VSCode Web/GitHub Codespaces far exceeds that of JetBrains IDEs', so that's where I'm at now - on-demand web-based IDEs and a thin client.
bombolo 4y ago
> Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s. I feel that's not my problem as an employee. I work the same amount of time regardless.
- julianeon 4y ago
  Yes, but the work you do has commercial value to you also, based on its merits alone. Example: without Intellij, you deploy some back end code interacting with an OCR solution. Example: with Intellij, you can build the whole OCR solution yourself. Doing the latter translates long term into higher salaries and more money in your pocket. You have to talk about what you did in interviews and your answers will be reflected in the offers you get. The only way this would not apply would be if you can say “I am absolutely sure I will never move on from, or be laid off by, my company,” which is not a recommended strategy in this economy.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    So you are saying that Intellij and IDE/completion make people smarter and more capable rather than a bit faster? Do you have any source for this very surprising claim?
    - bravura 4y ago
      You need supporting data that using high quality tools to ship next-level product will, in fact, upskill you as a developer? Can you list any alternate ways that one upskills?
      - bombolo 4y ago
        He said I will become able to implement an OCR. I'm arguing that installing an IDE won't teach me all the theory of image processing. And yes to convince me of that I need supporting data. > Can you list any alternate ways that one upskills? Studying, not installing stuff.
  - adql 4y ago
the__alchemist 4y ago
Same. That and Sublime. JB for the unrivaled power; Sublime for unrivaled responsiveness.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mylons 4y ago
I’m coming to feel this way about github copilot, especially as a solo dev right now. Is it perfect? No. But it works often and spits out code that’s a good enough template or good enough, and is something i’d likely find on stackoverflow anyway. It’s kind of like I’m reviewing a junior/mid dev’s code and almost like I have a second person working with me which I find very valuable.

by mythz 4y ago

qwerty456127 4y ago

JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.

lgas 4y ago
> I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price. To be fair, that's true of almost everything.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Most software sales are more elastic and would sell closer to half the number of units at twice the price, not meaningfully increasing revenue. (This can be good or bad, depending on the industry and the competition.)
mrguyorama 4y ago
Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
- skrtskrt 4y ago
  And the price goes down every year you renew for like four years I think? By year 4 you’re getting the all products pack for like $150/ year
  - geoelectric 4y ago
    Yeah, I jumped in when they first did subs back in 2015 (IIRC). Nowadays, the charge seems pretty trivial for what you get, though I think they may have just raised it on me a little to closer to $175. I also jumped into a personal O'Reilly Safari subscription way back when the price wasn't as high as it is now, and I've kept that grandfathered subscription up as well. I think between the two, it ends up being a bit less than $500 a year. That's not very much at all against a tech salary, and the O'Reilly sub actually has been quietly useful for work projects now and again too. My basic take is 1) A builder should have their own set of tools whether they hew wood or numbers (and not everything fits neatly into Visual Studio Code, though I probably use that as much or more than Jetbrains); and 2) if I ever do manage to squeeze out a profitable side project in CA, I want my argument that I'm not using my employer's resources in any way shape or form to be very very solid. In CA, who owns the resources is the difference in who owns that product. For the same reason, I always buy my own cell phone and pay my own cell phone plan, even if a corporate phone is otherwise forced on me, and always own my own laptop as well for any personal development that comes up. It's a touch on the paranoid side, I guess, but I just feel better knowing I can be as independent as I want to be with my tech stack. With my own tech library to lean on, a nearly universal set of build tools licensed specifically to me, and my own devices for communication and development, I feel very comfortable that there's no implied shared resource argument that can be made.
    - passthejoe 4y ago
      Smart.
hbn 4y ago
I'd pay for it if I did enough programming in my day-to-day life that it would justify the cost. But I only occasionally get into the swing of doing a project, and even then I've never made money off of any of them. I still have my university email (graduated in 2020) so I've been renewing my student license that gets me a free license for the occasional times I use them. I kinda wish they'd just go for the Winrar or Docker business model, where it's free for individuals but businesses have to pay up.

dopamean 4y ago

JetBrains IDEs are the only dev tool I pay for as well. I write kotlin professionally and for fun and the Intellij + Kotlin experience is the most I've enjoyed writing code since my early days learning Ruby.

nopenopenopeno 4y ago
Kotlin is such a lovely language, and I really like that it was made by JetBrains because that means I can count on a top notch IDE/development experience.
- jareds 4y ago
  The fact that Kotlin was created by JetBrains and appears to require their IDE to be productive is the reason I have no interest in it. I'm totally blind and while JetBrains IDE's are technically accessible with my screen reading software they are difficult to use unlike VSCode which makes an effort to be plesent to use with screen reader software not just technically possible to use.
  - culi 4y ago
    I've always used VSCode and I really don't see what it is that JetBrains can do that VSC can't. Any time there's a new language I'm picking up I can almost always count on a good extension to provide all the necessary intellisense I need. Good to hear they've done a better job with their screen reader accessibility as well. I learned to use VoiceOver a month ago (I do a lot of front-end dev work) and ever since then I've had a lot of appreciation for any app/site that manages to pull do it well
  - dopamean 4y ago
    Who said that kotlin requires intellij? Not a rhetorical question. I've never heard that claim before. Afaict there's nothing about the language that would make it impossible to use in another ide.
guytv 4y ago
This is one point that worries me about Kotlin (which I like a lot). Is it even practical developing in Kotlin using something other than IntelliJ? All of its toolsets come from the same company, which could kill it one day.

BMorearty 4y ago

Agreed. JetBrains and GitHub Copilot are the two exceptions for me as an individual programmer.

bombolo 4y ago
> GitHub Copilot are the two exceptions for me as an individual programmer I'm sure your boss will be overjoyed when the company will get hit by a lawsuit :)
- BMorearty 4y ago
  Oh yes I’m sure my boss is shaking in their boots about being liable for how I spend my own money on my own time for personal projects.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    The entire topic of the discussion was engineers buying their own work tools. You went OT. It happens. No reason to be snarky about it.
    - BMorearty 4y ago
      Disagree. The comment I replied to was about personally paying for tools. My read was that they meant for personal use. And you started the snark, not me.
      - culi 4y ago
        regardless I think a point was missed that you might end up pushing up code produced by copilot that could get your company in legal trouble While I think this concern has a lot of merit, I use Copilot a lot almost always just as a fancy autocomplete. I wouldn't ever let it produce a completely new piece of code for me and I imagine most other devs using it have the same practices so this critique never really hit

jve 4y ago

Few times I tried JetBrains rider trial because was fed up with Visual Studio performance issues and occasional crashes. But rider won't even compile my solution OOTB. Meh.

throwaway675309 4y ago

It's completely worth it to me to pay for the entire jetbrains suite annually. I'd say I use DataGrip, Webstorm, and Pycharm on a daily basis.

batushka3 4y ago

lycopodiopsida 4y ago
JetBrains is a czech company. And always was, as in "founded in Prague". Stop spreading FUD.
- somethingreen 4y ago
  Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech? Asking seriously. Because I was a russian speaking Ukrainian until recently and used to listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time, for years, starting back when JB products just started gaining popularity. Not once was the company or it's products regarded as Czech by russians. It was always talked about as russian, all the podcast guests from JB were russian, all the conf speakers were russian. Now, it wouldn't be the first time russians appropriated something that wasn't theirs. Which is why I'm asking if there are actually any signs of JB operating in Czechia outside of company being registered there. All I can find is JetbrainsCZ youtube channel with whopping 44 views on its single office walk video.
  - wasmitnetzen 4y ago
    They say they had three R&D offices (out of 6) in Russia and closed them in March 2022.[1] 131 out of 161 open positions on their career page list Prague as one of the possible locations.[2] [1]: Slide 35: https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/jetbrains/docs/corporate-overview/en-us/jetbrains_corporate_overview.pdf https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/jetbrains/d... [2]: https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/ https://www.jetbrains.com/careers/jobs/
  - lycopodiopsida 4y ago
    Why should an multinational IT company aiming at developers talk in a local language? How does a heritage of founders matters? Google is half a russian company by that metric, as in "Sergey Brin". JetBrains is a Czech company because it was created in Czech Republic and is operated from Czech Republic. They've had significant development resources in pre-war Russia, like many big companies, because it was a cheap and good. As the war started, they've rescued whoever they could and closed their russian offices.

worldsayshi 4y ago

I personally pay for Intellij but lately I've found it harder to motivate when vscode provides a very similar experience and especially since Python is supported out of the box for vscode.

worldsayshi 4y ago
After trying it a bit more I am slightly leaning towards keeping Intellij again. Mostly because of being better at the small things. Like more readable file tree-view and better project search tools.
xvector 4y ago
I personally find JetBrains IDEs' capabilities exceed that of VSCode. The IDE just feels better thought out to me. However, the convenience of VSCode Web/GitHub Codespaces far exceeds that of JetBrains IDEs', so that's where I'm at now - on-demand web-based IDEs and a thin client.

bombolo 4y ago

> Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s. I feel that's not my problem as an employee. I work the same amount of time regardless.

julianeon 4y ago
Yes, but the work you do has commercial value to you also, based on its merits alone. Example: without Intellij, you deploy some back end code interacting with an OCR solution. Example: with Intellij, you can build the whole OCR solution yourself. Doing the latter translates long term into higher salaries and more money in your pocket. You have to talk about what you did in interviews and your answers will be reflected in the offers you get. The only way this would not apply would be if you can say “I am absolutely sure I will never move on from, or be laid off by, my company,” which is not a recommended strategy in this economy.
- bombolo 4y ago
  So you are saying that Intellij and IDE/completion make people smarter and more capable rather than a bit faster? Do you have any source for this very surprising claim?
  - bravura 4y ago
    You need supporting data that using high quality tools to ship next-level product will, in fact, upskill you as a developer? Can you list any alternate ways that one upskills?
    - bombolo 4y ago
      He said I will become able to implement an OCR. I'm arguing that installing an IDE won't teach me all the theory of image processing. And yes to convince me of that I need supporting data. > Can you list any alternate ways that one upskills? Studying, not installing stuff.
- adql 4y ago

the__alchemist 4y ago

Same. That and Sublime. JB for the unrivaled power; Sublime for unrivaled responsiveness.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mylons 4y ago

I’m coming to feel this way about github copilot, especially as a solo dev right now. Is it perfect? No. But it works often and spits out code that’s a good enough template or good enough, and is something i’d likely find on stackoverflow anyway. It’s kind of like I’m reviewing a junior/mid dev’s code and almost like I have a second person working with me which I find very valuable.