Who Pays For Your Development Tools When You Work At Home?

The boss expects you to be available 24×7, and to fix a bug at 7:00am on Sunday. Fine; these days, everyone is at least a part-time telecommuter. But who pays for the development tools (and other software) you use for your DayJob programming?

“Where do I go to report my boss for piracy?” asked the guy who’d just logged into the IRC channel. Because of a project deadline, the developer had been asked to work from home over the weekend; but he didn’t have a copy of Visual Studio on his home computer. According to the developer, the boss asked, “Don’t you have a friend who has a copy?”

In an ideal world, your company issues you a laptop as your primary computer (the fastest one money can buy), loaded up with the latest version of every development tool you might possibly want. In the office, you’re given a docking station and a huge honkin’ monitor. Then (despite the dangers of the the laptop drive of shame), at least you can schlep your computer home, and telecommute when it’s convenient or necessary.

It isn’t an ideal world.

This problem isn’t limited to developers, of course. I know one comptroller whose ancient home PC died. She suggested to her boss that he buy her a netbook with a recent copy of Microsoft Office (which is heavily used in her company); he said No, because the boss was sure she’d use it for home stuff too. (This is a problem?) As a result, the bean counter explained, “When he sends me Excel files now, I just tell him, ‘Sorry, I don’t have Microsoft Office on the computer I bought for myself.’ You’ll have to wait until I’m in the office on Monday.” She doesn’t quite regret it, because her inability to work on the weekend is “forcing” her to enjoy the time off with her family. But it’s caused an eensy bit of strife with the CEO.

On the other hand, developers have a long tradition of being available for the 24×7 timeframe in which their applications are running, starting in the days where we’d get phone calls at 2:00am when the mainframe batch job didn’t load (because the operator grabbed the wrong tape—not that I hold a grudge or anything). Accessibility to development tools is arguably a job requirement (feel free to argue), and it’s why remote logins were devised long before the IT department figured out that someone (oh my) could access the internal systems from outside the firewall.

For some projects—though I can’t imagine it’ll work for everything—you can use one of the free editions of the Microsoft Express suite.

Or, obviously, if you adopt FOSS software, such as Eclipse, Subversion or other open source tools, this isn’t a big deal. Just download the latest version of the open source app. But that may or may not be an option for developers whose work environment unrelentingly requires proprietary software.

If you can’t convince the boss to give you a laptop pre-installed with everything you need, and your shop isn’t particularly open-source friendly… what do you do? “Find a friend,” as the IRC developer’s boss recommended? Buy your own copy (using the profits from the freelance programming projects you haven’t told your manager about)? Tell the boss, “Sorry, I don’t have those tools at home” (and then spend the weekend Having A Life)? Or what?

I don’t know the “right answer” or if there even is a right answer. But this seems to be an issue that people don’t talk about. And maybe they should.