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.
Ultimately, the tools I try out are the ones that don't make me involve other people in it, whether to inform or to get approval. This is extremely important at the beginning - particularly when I don't know the tool beforehand, so testing it is a bet.
Thus, extrapolating from my experience, I'd consider the main problem with paid tooling is that it usually requires getting other people in the loop. Even if it's sold in a way where you could use your personal paid license at work, that fact is very often unclear from the license text - unclear enough that you probably don't want the risk of procurement/legal disagreeing with your assessment.
(If we're talking SaaS/anything with on-line components, there's no way I'm touching this on my own - I have enough headache with exports control around remote work, I'm not going to risk anything I do be considered technology transfer.)
I feel I'm not atypical with this - I suspect developers in general have an opposite relationship with software licensing to that of their employer. For a company, OSS is random, unpredictable - while commercial licensing is safe, because there's a contract and a way to sue someone. For a developer, OSS is easy to understood, zero risk, no need to involve other people - while commercial is completely arbitrary, every piece of software has a different license, and thus it's very strongly preferred to involve management/procurement/legal in this, because you don't want the liability on your shoulders.
A discussion I was party to recently was debating which of open source vs several competing commercial products to use for a new development. Chief complaint raised about open source product by the team members on the business side of things was “oh it’s open source, that means there’ll be no support right?”. Comparatively my teammate and I had the reverse reaction: we know for a fact the open source alternative is at least 90% as good, if not better than the alternatives, we don’t have to wait to go through the rigmarole of purchasing, approvals, waiting for someone to sign contracts, finance to sort things, finding out you need another key because another person will be working on it as well, discovering the support is invariably shitty, and then being stuck with it when it turns out to be poor software and the business side won’t budge, because that means they’ll need to do things again (which will take weeks at best) and they’ll inevitably just end up re-signing the contract for another year.
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).
If they want more adoption, they need to be under the $100 mark.
I guess you proved the original point of this thread.
You see this in other professions. A car mechanic doesn't want to take there car to someone else. A doctor tries to avoid general checkups with other doctors. A realitor will sell their own house. A grass cutter doesn't hire someone to cut his lawn. The person who makes lawnmowers doesn't buy one he makes one even if it takes longer.
Also making the reverse assertion true too: that client has a fool for a lawyer :-)
Of course, many unsuspecting non-lawyer clients also have fools for lawyers; it's hard to tell whether or not your lawyer is any good (unless his name is Saul Goodman)
However, my current job is developing a voice response system for restaurant drive-thrus. I don't have time to write my own IDE right now!
So I farm that out to JetBrains and get to use all of their awesome work for less than fifty cents a day.
If that's too much, their free versions are very good too.
I may also take exception to this:
> A doctor tries to avoid general checkups with other doctors.
Wouldn't the opposite be true? As far as I know, every psychiatrist has a psychiatrist, every counselor has a counselor (or should), and I would guess that every doctor has a doctor.
A doctor is more likely than the rest of us to have particular insight into their own health, but I don't think they try to do it all alone.
Of course I'm only speaking for myself. If anyone prefers to write all their own tools, more power to them!
Even if you make 30k a year, $200 for access to a variety of tools you rely on to do your job is a no brainer.
I pay more for Apple products because they bring a lot of value.
I don't see the value for many developer tools at their price.
Especially when the options are free.
A car lets me do a lot of things, not just a single thing.
I think development tools are overpriced. Under a $100 I can see. Over that is just too much.
This is not to say that I don't pay for tools; I subscribe to the full Jetbrains set among other things. It's just that that wasn't as simple of a decision as you present it.
I can only speak for myself, but to me, "no brainer" is an understatement.
Companies need to hire and pay more for "licensed" developers.
It gives power to developers - and then I don't have to sell to managers or deal with uninterested clerks.
One alternative approach I could think of that the employer should give each programmer a dev-tools -budget per year. That would encourage programmers to experiment with better tools and find the best ones.