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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

Someone making $250k/year shouldn't think twice dropping $21/month on a tool that truly makes them more productive.

A year or two ago I bought a personal license to Ubuntu FIPS after being urgently asked to debug an issue w/ Python's OpenSSL bindings. Unsurprisingly it turned out that my company had an enterprise license, and had I known whom to contact (which I didn't), I could have gotten a license key in a couple of days. But why waits days and potentially many thousands of dollars of time when I could buy a license now and get started immediately?

Frankly, it's weird how Silicon Valley employees making obscene amounts of money balk at personal expenses as if they're some minimum wage employee being victimized by their employer nickel-and-diming them. But that's just me. In fact, except at startups, Silicon Valley corporations neither expect this nor even give you credit for taking such initiative.

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Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that shouldn't be followed. Because it hides the true cost of a project, which may result in poor decisions later on. Because the cost of a decision/process should fall on the person or company who has the ability to change it. Because using wages to pay for business expenses wasn't part of the employment agreement. Any one of these would suffice.

For personal expenses (meaning expenses for my own hobby projects, not "personal expenses" to mean business expenses paid by an employee as you have used it), $21 would be a quick decision. But using that same $21 to shore up a faulty requisition process? Nope, not at all.

> Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that shouldn't be followed.

It also allows small creators to survive.

I'm working on hybrid mobile apps again after a long break. The number of essential packages in both the Ionic/Capacitor/Cordova and React Native ecosystems that are "looking for maintainers" (think: camera functionality) and have long lists of issues is frankly astounding, given the number of users of said packages.

An expectation to pay so the maintainers can maintain is a good thing in my book.

Except that's not the issue being discussed here. Expecting to pay for software development isn't a bad thing. Expecting the employee to pay out of pocket for business expenses is the exploitative behavior.

The problem is that there's simply no easy fix for these bureaucratic frictions and sub-optimal equilibriums. It's the nature of large organizations--they trade efficiencies in some areas for inefficiencies in others.

I decided long ago not to worry about such expenses because 1) the engineer in me hates this inefficiency and urges me to fix or work around it (depending on your perspective), 2) navigating bureaucratic red tape takes a personal toll, and as someone who is paid well I don't mind at all spending a trivial amount of money for my own wellbeing, even if its for work, and 3) as someone who has worked in startups and even founded one, I've both been in a position where I was expected to take on such expenses and expected others to do the same (at least as an initial matter[1]).

[1] The dilemma is that unless the purchaser faces some risk of incurring the expense themself, they're not as incentivized to consider the reasonableness of the purchase. The solution is either 1) requiring permission beforehand, or 2) hiring more mature employees who understand the nature of the dilemma and who have already factored this responsibility and risk into their negotiated compensation. The latter doesn't scale, though, which is why large organizations invariably regress to the former.

Unfortunately your policy, in a small way, perpetuates this ‘sub-optimal’ efficiency by obscuring the true cost of your work from your employer.

You’re making life harder for everyone else!

It's not about $x a month, it's about the friction of dropping any money at all. It could be 10c/year and still annoy everyone, because now they have to go through a procurement process, find someone with a company credit card, wrangle with reimbursement forms, etc.

Docker arguably should be charging more for it. The friction between $0 and $21/month is higher than the friction between $21/month and $60/month in a lot of ways.

This 1000x developers are lazy and generally don't want go throug bureaucratic hassle. Long run this just going to hurt docker when developers start using podman or some other free alternative.

A couple comments earlier people were talking about where does this stop, 1000$ a month? A 3D CAD license with the ability to do FEA is around 30 grand a year, I’ve seen seats of specialized software cost north of 100k a year per seat, and that’s for people that 100k is probably pretty close to their take home.

So where does it stop? Is 250$ ok but 1000 isn’t?

I think we’ve set the line just fine, if you want to cover opex out of pocket, cool. But don’t try to put that on people who can’t afford it.

So ignoring holidays, $250k/yr works out to $120/hr.

How long does it really take to set up the VM and port forwarding to have most of what people care for from docker desktop locally. A couple of hours. Let's say 3. So cost $360.

How long does it take to go through your average large company requisition process? Probably 2 hours over multiple weeks. So that's $84 for the license at the $7 tier, and $240 for the time spent dealing with the corporations self inflicted tedium. But hey, $324, still technically cheaper.

But then there's the opportunity cost of waiting two weeks to install fucking docker. I think we can all agree that's worth more than $36.

So I'll be looking at alternative solutions rather than deal with the corporate purchasing bureaucracy. Even if the purchasing manager was reacting in real time I'd probably consider it worth $36 not to deal with the process.

For companies it's not that easy though. Employees will accumulate services and don't cancel them, will leave without leaving any info on which services were bought for what purposes etc. Companies still need proper invoices and account for all charges. If they cannot accomplish this because employees forgot they bought services or have left without letting anyone know, the company is on the hook for it.

Having worked with procurement departments I can understand very well why employees should never be able to make purchasing decisions without someone from procurement in the loop.

As someone who went from the PA suburbs and small IT shops (where 75k was a premium salary) to the SF startup scene and Facebook, one of the observations that has stuck with me was the incredible cheapness of my wealthy tech peers. It's hard to explain unless you've been around people who do a whole lot more with a whole lot less.

Maybe they’re wealthy because they aren’t spending all their money on shit their employer should buy. You say cheap, others say “good with money”.

I noticed this exact same thing in my ex-FAANG colleagues. No judgment, just an observation.

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