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No, it's not because of that. It's because: 1. You want to control spend - there are budgets. 2. You want to control accounting - minimize the number of vendor

No, it's not because of that. It's because: 1. You want to control spend - there are budgets. 2. You want to control accounting - minimize the number of vendors you work with. Each billing needs to come with an invoice, these need to be managed, when a developer leaves you need to cancel their seat etc. It's a pain. 3. You want to control compliance - are these tools safe? Are they accessing sensitive data? Are they audited? 4. You want to control interoperability between teams. Can't have it become a zoo of bring-your-own stuff. So free tools get around all of these, you can just wing it under the radar and if the tool becomes prominent enough then you go fight the war to have it adopted. Once there's spend, you need to get into line. And that line makes a lot of sense when you're into 30 developers, let alone hundreds.

strken 1y ago
If you've got 30 developers then you've probably got, what, five or six teams? Your tech leads/senior engineers/whoever provides tech leadership at a team level are operating at a scale where they can go to the pub with your head of engineering/CTO/each other/the dude from finance who has a credit card and fit around a table. I've worked at companies that size and the "war" involved putting time in the calendar of the head of engineering, asking how his son was, demoing the product we wanted for about two minutes and explaining the pain point it solved, then promising to get our legal team and the one security person to review it after he put the credit card in and before we used it in prod. When I worked somewhere larger it was much more difficult.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  Obviously all of this is far from universal. I've worked at places that just gave me a card with $500-$1000mo limit for whatever I need. I've worked at a place when I asked for $100 of hard drive space to test something out of production they said find another way.

strken 1y ago

If you've got 30 developers then you've probably got, what, five or six teams? Your tech leads/senior engineers/whoever provides tech leadership at a team level are operating at a scale where they can go to the pub with your head of engineering/CTO/each other/the dude from finance who has a credit card and fit around a table. I've worked at companies that size and the "war" involved putting time in the calendar of the head of engineering, asking how his son was, demoing the product we wanted for about two minutes and explaining the pain point it solved, then promising to get our legal team and the one security person to review it after he put the credit card in and before we used it in prod. When I worked somewhere larger it was much more difficult.

citizenpaul 1y ago
Obviously all of this is far from universal. I've worked at places that just gave me a card with $500-$1000mo limit for whatever I need. I've worked at a place when I asked for $100 of hard drive space to test something out of production they said find another way.