Their IDEs have been nosediving for years now in a way usually reserved to "has been acquired by private equity". But they have not been acquired by private equity as far as I can tell.
I'm writing this from my laptop, where each keypress in a .md file in WebStorm makes the fan spin up (not hyperbole).
What happened, JetBrains?
Most development was done in Russia (disregard tales sold to the West about them supposedly being a Czech company, they were Czech mostly in the name, real work happened elsewhere). Exited Russia in the beginning of 2022, leaving many talented people behind: not everyone wanted or could leave because of families, obligations, personal beliefs.
Remembering where most of JB's money was coming from, can't really say they had a choice.
In my experience, another major factor is Sergey Dmitriev’s (the sole owner of the company) management style. He keeps a tight grip on major decisions, with a fairly “my way or the highway” approach. That favors managers who are comfortable with the arrangement and can drive away people who want more autonomy or a say in the company’s direction.
For years, when JetBrains faced relatively little competition, that structure worked well enough. As the market changed, though, it became harder for the company to adapt.
The previous CEO has lost the business and wasn’t able to deliver any new products. He was replaced together with executive suite few years ago. As for me they are now even more clueless than before and don’t have any strategy, and very few of us are still excited about JB future.
The answer is more like the obvious one...our category is getting redefined, at hyper-speed, and all of the players are all over the map trying to sort this out.
I like what we're doing with JetBrains Air. We know what we bring to the table, who it's for, and we're doubling down on developers and development.
That said, CPU fan on Markdown is not cool. Want me to look through it with you?
Honestly not really.
I mean I am happy that there is some kind of response, but this is just damage control.
And, frankly, you do not need me to fix that. Of that I am certain.
I'm not running any weird setups or something out of the ordinary. If you actually test your software on a normal computer (think: random thinkpad with 8th gen intel cpu), running some random boring linux distribution (think: debian) you will run into these problems.
The bad experiences all so far have been smoke-test-level issues.
Or.. well. Product strategy. Not even bugs or performance issues at all.
__
But, yeah, you had to say something. I understand that, given your role as "developer advocate" (as per the HN account about section). This is your job after all.
But, honestly, sticking ones head in the sand and hoping that this passes might've been the strategically more wise move.
The problems your employer has cannot be fixed by one person taking their time and looking at an individual issue some other vocal guy on the web has. I think we both know that.
I'm sorry, genuinely.
- This is a real problem with JB IDEs
- It is not specific to an individual's setup
- It has existed for many years
- Anyone at JB who actually is interested in diagnosing or fixing it does not need to extract details, support tickets, or logs from users, as it's trivial to reproduce on any system.I really hope that you guys manage to turn the ship around, but after experiencing the decline myself and paying until this year, all my goodwill towards Jetbrains has been used up. At this point, I would never consider paying full price again.
Have you guys discussed (if you're able to share) allowing customers to resume subscriptions, which they've cancelled during the decline years? For me, that would be an important step to rebuilding trust.
They will bring a 9950x with nothing else running to a crawl. Then complain they are out of memory. (When it is obviously the IDEs themselves running the system out of memory)
I <3 JB IDEs for their functionality, but resource pigs they are.
The OP post feels like completely marketing department, no skin in the game. I'm afraid they are becoming Borland.
What else can one use?
Excluding VSCode and all those AI-first IDEs I mean. JetBrains' git features have been excellent. I have not yet seen them be reproduced anywhere, but, eventually, they will kill that classic UI plugin. :(