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Comment by riprock | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Jeff and Joel are still on Bizspark. StackOverflow is ~2 years old.

And after 3 years if they need to spend 10k on licensing for a very successful site that will be peanuts compared to their own time spent. Or do they value that at nothing?

I think this is a bad article/interview because it gives the impression that you can't do websites in asp.net MVC on the cheap.

You are assuming that we would spend more time using RoR then ASP.NET, we have found this to be the opposite. We build out and deploy features in much less time then we would on ASP.NET now.

Not sure if this is feasible, but it would be great to post your ASP.NET vs RoR code to compare the delta.

When is $10,000 peanuts? Seriously - I'd rather bonus a developer that money then hand it over for something I can get for free.

I think the point is $1 is too much money if the tools aren't the best. But $10k is not a lot of money if the tools are great. I tell my team, if you find a tool that makes you more productive, buy it. There's almost no reasonably priced tool that wouldn't be worth it if the dev thought it was.

We budget around $10k per dev for tools and training per year. We usually come in a fair bit under, but given we spend over $200k/year per dev, this is a small fraction of their cost.

I think your point is that the tools weren't the right fit. Because if they were, it seems like baulking at $10k is a sign that you can't make the right cost-beneift tradeoff -- which is a very bad sign for a company.

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