A business model based on engineers as the decision makers is perfectly possible. But it is confined to tools where an engineer can make a local optimisation without direct impact beyond that scope. IDEs are the best example. Engs in a company can be allowed to make whatever personal IDE decision that makes each one of them more productive, and the global impact of aggregating those individual decisions will be ok. Jetbrains is a testament to this.

But this is not the same for every tool. The thread author focuses on examples that fall in this second category like Redis, Terraform, AWS, etc. Unlike with IDEs, sprawl resulting from individual decisions in databases, infra management or cloud infra becomes a problem. For both! The company has to maintain a heterogeneous stack. The seller can’t make a meaningful enterprise deal just because some team chose Redis. This means that you will want to do some standardisation. At that point the impact of the choice and the size of the license become big enough that, in the same way as eng leads will want a say, finance will too, for good reason.

And needless to say, the moment finance is in the picture you will have to justify the choice in a language that is challenging for most engineers.