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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

This may be seen as radical. But I think AI tools should be paid by the employee. After all, you should know how to do your work without AI.

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Should they pay for their pipelines too?

After all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.

The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.

The better analogy would be "Tools should be paid for by the mechanic". Experienced ones tend to have $10K+ worth of tools that they paid for.

Your mechanic is an independent entrepreneur. If they work in a shop with other mechanics, they for sure don't each have duplicate $10k sets of tools.

Well, I am my own mechanic, and worked for multiple shops before I started doing this. Everyone owns their own tools.

You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.

I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.

I don't understand your logic, why would an employee pay for a tool their employer wants them to use?

Yeah that only makes sense if they are a freelancer/contractor.

Extremely tangential but I'm feeling a bit rambley today.

Pretty early in my software career I had a job at a very awful company [0]. They wanted me to use the software "Weblog Analyzer" to analyze Apache logs and create reports that no one actually read. I was to do this twice a week. It wasn't hard and it only took like fifteen minutes so I didn't really mind doing it.

Initially I had a 30 or 60 day trial for the software, but once that expired the software (understandably) stopped working. I went to the director of technology, asking him to buy me to the software, and he responded back with "whoooa, hold up, that's not within the budget". To be clear, this software was, I believe, less than $100.

I responded back with something like "Ok, well then I'm not going to make these reports anymore". He acted surprised, like I was starting some kind of fucking mutiny, and he asked me why I'm being difficult. I said something to the effect of "I don't make that much money as it is, and I'm not going to spend my own money to make your company more money". [1]

He responded back with "Well [my direct manager] never asked me to buy this software", to which I responded with "Well [manager] is a moron who doesn't know anything".

Like a fucking sitcom, unbeknownst to me my manager was right behind me and heard the entire conversation. The next day I was fired. I don't completely blame them, it was admittedly very mean to say that about my manager even though I did (and still do) believe it.

I later found out that my manager had actually asked for the software years before, the director had said no and forgotten, and my direct manager had just bought the software with their own money.

Point is, at least some employers seem to have no issues making employees pay for their own tools, even for tools that they very specifically want the employees to use.

[0] This was a W2 job, not a contract gig.

[1] I even offered to try and find some alternative free software that might give us something similar, but he immediately poopoo'd that idea because they really liked these very specific charts that they never actually read.

Sure. Should I also pay rent for my desk at the office?

They're welcome to let you use the desk at your house that you own.

I am fine with that if I can keep the time saved for my personal use.

I’d love it if I could bring my own computer to do my work, rather than be stuck with garbage hardware because of an enterprise agreement.

Wait, okay maybe I'm in a bubble, but every org I've worked at understood that giving us whatever hardware we want more than pays for itself, and very quickly.

I can't fathom the logic of paying 10k a month for a developer and giving them an 800 device.

Insane. Your leadership is severely broken. If you can, work somewhere that values you.

I could still do my job by typing all code into notepad, but companies don't charge employees for their IDE usage for a reason.

And I could do my job by paying someone overseas to do it for me. Why is that not paid by the employer then?

If you can actually do that effectively, many companies will happily make you a manager.

If my employer is not forcing me to use a tool and gives me freedom, I'll be perfectly OK to use my own tools which I bought with my own money.

If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.

Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.

Nah. Work provides the tools.

An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.

In California this would mean the employee would own the IP -- or at least it would be murky -- and companies and lawyers don't like murky.

As someone who does have to pay for my own AI tools (if I didn't use OpenCode's free models), I agree.

Employer pays tools used for work. Whether they are used to speed up work or to make it possible.

"employees should foot the bill for tools that directly benefit their billion dollar employers"

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