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Not sure what it is like for other professions but in software development I've found getting approval for buying tools to be a cumbersome process. The most rid

Not sure what it is like for other professions but in software development I've found getting approval for buying tools to be a cumbersome process. The most ridiculous case was a $10 license that took several months to get approved and involved multiple 'C' level executives at a company with about 30k employees. At the same company, I was denied access to a cloud service that the company already had a subscription to because my process would use $0.03 of compute time per month, which we were quite willing to pay. There were no security concerns or anything else, just two mid-level managers trying to extract resources out of each other. Those are extremes but even simple things like getting a $100 plugin to parse a particular data format ends up being a time-wasting process that far exceeds the cost of the plugin, and if drawn out enough, the savings it would have produced over building it ourselves. As a result, building it ourselves tends to end up being the default choice.

Veserv 3y ago
That is because the budget for you or your team has a big fat $0 for tooling. It is a shameful and degrading state of affairs. Developer time is so expensive it is insane to spend more than a few minutes thinking about a $100 purchase. Your team should have thousands of dollars of open budget per member per year for tooling or critical purchases. Obviously it needs to be rectified regularly to evaluate if the purchases are actually worthwhile, but needing complex process for trivial expenditures like $1,000 is insane. The funniest thing is that operations, cloud deployment, and data science teams do get serious tooling budget. Even though the fields are relatively adjacent and usually include some degree of software development, the fact that they are less capable of building their own tools means they get orders of magnitude more tooling spend. Everybody knows that developer time is too valuable to spend when we can just throw more machines and tools at the problem. But in actual software development, we just forget that and go right back to wasting valuable developer time by cheaping out on tools. It is amazing. It is about time we get some respect for our time and demand tooling budgets.

Veserv 3y ago

That is because the budget for you or your team has a big fat $0 for tooling. It is a shameful and degrading state of affairs. Developer time is so expensive it is insane to spend more than a few minutes thinking about a $100 purchase. Your team should have thousands of dollars of open budget per member per year for tooling or critical purchases. Obviously it needs to be rectified regularly to evaluate if the purchases are actually worthwhile, but needing complex process for trivial expenditures like $1,000 is insane. The funniest thing is that operations, cloud deployment, and data science teams do get serious tooling budget. Even though the fields are relatively adjacent and usually include some degree of software development, the fact that they are less capable of building their own tools means they get orders of magnitude more tooling spend. Everybody knows that developer time is too valuable to spend when we can just throw more machines and tools at the problem. But in actual software development, we just forget that and go right back to wasting valuable developer time by cheaping out on tools. It is amazing. It is about time we get some respect for our time and demand tooling budgets.