Most programmers are financial morons

Published on: 01.01.2019

Let me start with one true story from the year 2011.

At that time I was working as a software programmer (90% C++) in a team of 5 people.

One morning, a friend from team started showing cool new source code editor called Sublime Text.

He was very happy with it, he used it on the job, for his own pet projects, and for his freelancing side jobs for almost few months.

But for him Sublime Text had one drawback, he had to pay 100$ for it (at time of this writing Sublime Text license is 80$, but I think that at that time it was 100$, but I could be wrong).

At that time I know that my friend is a financial moron.

I tried to explain to him, using same logic like in this blog post, but he just could not get it, he only understood that he has to spend money.

Why most programmers are financial morons

Let say that he was only using Sublime Text every second day (altho, knowing him it was probably every day).

With every second day assumption that is 182 day per year.

He was happy with a new tool, it was better for him, so let us say that he got 10 extra minutes of work every day.

10 minutes times 182 days is 30 hours of work more per year.

To get a break even he would need to make 3,33$ per hour of work.

Even at that time, he was charging his freelance rate at 20$ per hour and he had around 5 hours of billable work hours per week.

He is a smart guy, but he was thinking that toll is expensive.

Economically speaking, he does not know how to do a cost-benefit analysis.

It is strange how logically intelligent programmers (believe me, you do have to be logically intelligent to write computer programs) never invest in tools that basically have ROI in days.

Conclusion

Do cost benefit analysis before saying that something is expensive or cheap.

Disclaimer:
I have no interest do you use or buy Sublime Text or not, I am just using it as an example.

One comment

  1. Your point is well taken about doing cost benefit analysis, ROI etc. However, when it comes to tools or anything that helps someone:
    – To get into action.
    – To get things done.
    – To accomplish their goals sooner rather than later.
    – To finish their tasks rather than procrastinate because the other free/cheaper tool is so annoying.

    In such a case, spending money is worth every penny, cost is irrelevant unless it is prohibitively high !

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