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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay

And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.

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Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.

Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.

My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.

This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.

If your employer allows you to pay for development software, they can get into legal issues.

Companies (depending on jurisdiction) are not allowed to make employees pay for items necessary for work.

And allowing employees to pay can easily be misinterpreted into subtly pressuring employees to pay.

It's not about having the means, it's about most companies having policies and processes structured around common software used by all employees in a similar position to allow for collaboration, and to ensure compliance with whatever governance and licenses apply. You don't see orgs where some devs can choose GitHub, others GitLab. IDEs are more interchangeable, of course, but each developer having to set up their own config from scratch (correct plugins, build config, testing framework, etc.) would be a colossal waste of time for no reason.

Some bigger orgs allow flexibility (devs can pick Mac or Linux-based laptops, VS Code or JetBrains as the IDE, etc.), but not bring your own with your own license.

This seems to be what JetBrains has been betting on for a long time. Don't need to build a competent text editor if you can give management the right buzzwords.

Since it's a tool for writing code and not prose, it does not have to be a competent text editor if it's a competent "AST editor", which it very much is. Much more so than any alternative, commercial or otherwise.

Are you implying that JetBrains ides are not competent?

Compared to their alternatives like Eclipse, Visual Studio etc I think they're a huge step up. If you're a fan of simpler tools like vim, emacs or vscode etc I can see that they may not be to your taste, but I think their products are great. They're easy to get started with, powerful when you learn to use them, relatively bug free and I'd say they significantly boost my productivity.

I think that may very well be the first time ever I hear Emacs called a "simple tool"! :L

It could be said that all it does is one task, interpret Emacs Lisp, thus simple

But then we would have difficulty explaining why that one task takes 300,000 lines of C.

I don't really know anything about it. In my mind it's similar to vim or vscode, a text editor where you can add lots of functionality but without the customization it probably doesn't do that much useful stuff for you.

I have access to both an MSDN subscription paid through my employer and Rider that I pay for myself. I use Rider over VS2022. Why? VS2022 is slower and way more flaky with Android development. Rider has Resharper built in. I like that I can use 1 IDE vendor's products for everything I need (Pycharm, IntelliJ, Rider, RustRover and Android Studio.)

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