[HN Gopher] Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
Author : OJFord
Score : 1007 points
Date : 2020-12-18 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| I'm really glad for these guys, they made a phenomenal product
| that made life easier for me to develop on. I'm glad Google
| picked them for Android, it's a dream come true for a hacker.
| speg wrote:
| Love the idea, but could never get into their software. It always
| felt very alien, especially on OS X. I figured it was due to
| whatever Java UI framework they were using.
|
| Has that changed it recent years? Does it feel more native? I
| just set up a new machine, maybe I'll give it a whirl.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Does it feel more native?_
|
| No, it feels like a good app. Doesn't have to feel native, same
| way Photoshop or Vim doesn't have too, they just have to be
| good pro tools.
|
| Of course native is better, but only if all other things are
| equal.
| valuearb wrote:
| $7B valuation on only $200M in EBITDA, let alone profits?
|
| If they aren't thinking of selling now in this silly market for
| that ridiculous valuation I admire how centered they are on
| things more important than money, such as building and owning
| your own ideas.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| That's not a really high multiple for a software subscription
| business.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Isn't JetBrains a Russian company that moved their HQ to Prague
| due to fear of Russian government?
| cabirum wrote:
| No, not due to fear. It's just somewhat easier to sell their
| products using a EU based legal entity. Another example would
| be Yandex, registered in the Nethelands.
|
| JetBrains main dev offices are in St Petersburg, Moscow,
| Novosibirsk.
| TravelPiglet wrote:
| The Czech Republic wasn't part of the EU in 2000.
| krzyk wrote:
| Well, it was "a bit" closer to EU than Russia :)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I've never met JetBrains dev who wasn't Russian, and I've met
| a few (all really smart).
| marcinzm wrote:
| Based on Wikipedia it was founded in the Czech Republic by
| three Russians in 2000 which makes it a Czech company just as
| much as Tesla is an American company (rather than South
| African).
|
| edit: Fixed founding date, coffee hasn't kicked in yet
| FpUser wrote:
| >"...Tesla is an American company (rather than South
| African)"
|
| Difference being that Tesla does not keep their core team in
| South Africa.
| mcv wrote:
| They weren't founded in 2010, but in 2000.
|
| I was a bit confused for a moment, because I distinctly
| remember using either IntelliJ or RubyMine in 2008.
|
| I had no idea they were a Czech company with Russian founders
| though. Good to hear not everything comes from SV.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Ooops, fixed, thanks.
| tailsdog wrote:
| As I understood it Tesla was founded by Americans and later
| Musk bought in.
| peteretep wrote:
| > Tesla was founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by
| Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos,
| California ... A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard
| and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard,
| Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves
| co-founders
| usrusr wrote:
| Well, SpaceX isn't exactly considered "Africa's Space
| Programme" either. (But Jetbrains is surely far more
| Russian than SpaceX is South African)
| konart wrote:
| It's just marketing & taxes (I assume).
|
| Everything else is in St.Petersburg. Not too long ago they even
| bought[1] hotel complex for their office.
|
| Now they are building another business center[2] near by.
|
| [1] https://vc.ru/office/83175-ofis-jetbrains-v-sankt-
| peterburge [2] https://nsp.ru/5683-mozgi-sobirayutsya-u-
| gazproma
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Hope they will increase even more human resources dedicated to
| Kotlinc :)
| hans0l074 wrote:
| I recently stumbled upon the Jetbrains TV youtube channel
| specifically this one about Go [1]. I don't have Goland
| specifically but it's really nice that if you have a licensed
| Ultimate edition of the IDE, you get all that. I have been using
| IntelliJ for many years now (on a personal license)but pleasantly
| surprised how many nice/useful features are a key stroke away.
| Would recommend a quick watch.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0jvAea46YM
| andylynch wrote:
| Happy to see this, it's well earned. I've used their products
| since IDEA v3 back in 2003 and it's consistently been excellent.
| Hard to believe IDEA is 20 years old next month!
| joshsyn wrote:
| well deserved
| throw14082020 wrote:
| I don't want to seem like a complainer, but AppCode is still not
| working as good as I'd like (indexing is really slow, misses out
| of a lot features that other Jetbrains products have, and also
| extra bugs). But it's still 5x better than XCode _. And thats the
| point, they 're making a better iOS development environment than
| Apple
|
| _ They miss out on some features where you have to XCode, but
| this is Apple's fault.
| mekster wrote:
| Agreed. I just quit using it and thrown in Vim key binding to
| xcode instead.
| rexreed wrote:
| Love what Jetbrains is doing and their success.
|
| But I did come here to note that Jetbrains are as much
| billionaires (on paper) as the Theranos founders were when the
| press was fawning over Elizabeth Holmes as the youngest "self-
| made" billionaire. I'm not comparing the companies. Just there's
| a big difference between paper billionaire and hard asset
| billionaire.
| mythz wrote:
| Huge fan, couldn't be happier for their success based on
| delivering untold dev productivity & joy. Great example of a
| customer focused Co's achieving success through relentless
| product focus.
|
| All their products are amazing, I'm on the all products pack
| subscription which is insane value - by far the best value
| commercial software I've ever used that's always ahead of the
| competition and gets smarter with every release.
| dionian wrote:
| their java IDE was making the competition look really bad 15+
| years ago. and never stopped. they deserve every penny
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Thank the gods for JetBrains. I love their software.
|
| Excellent business model, I get to keep the software I bought
| when the license expires. Never forced to continually pay for
| something you don't see value in updating. I think that's one of
| the key factors which drives them to continue to improve their
| products. If future version of their products wasn't vastly
| improved over the previous then people wouldn't upgrade because
| their current version serves them perfectly fine. And if you
| don't like this years update, maybe you'll like next years. No
| downsides whatsoever.
|
| Never used any of their TeamCity/Spaces stuff but it looks cool.
| I can definitely say I'm a fan of their IDEs though. Use them
| every day.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| It is interesting that they initially offered subscription
| model without unexpirable license. But because of community
| backlash they changed it and people seem to be happy with the
| outcome.
|
| Listen to your users.
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| > It is interesting that they initially offered subscription
| model without unexpirable license.
|
| I wasn't even aware they ever did licenses that 'fully
| expire' but I'm glad they have their current model.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It went Buy_every_version_you_want -> Hard_license ->
| Outcry -> Current model.
| nightski wrote:
| Current model still isn't perfect as you only get the
| version that existed when your sub _starts_ not when it
| ends. So if your sub expires you actually have to downgrade
| the product to an old version.
|
| Before if you bought a major point release you would get
| all minor point releases as upgrades. Now you don't even
| get any bug fixes that occurred since your sub started.
|
| I love their products though.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You'll get bugfixes (all .Z releases in X.Y.Z scheme).
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| I feel like you are understating the backlash they faced. I
| came back from a vacation the day after they announced it and
| checked here, /r/programming, and a few other developer-
| focused forums including their own site and it was like the
| world was on fire. There were very few people who supported
| the change or were even indifferent. It seemed like the
| entire community united against it. JetBrains really didn't
| have a choice but to listen. And thankfully they did; their
| products are invaluable to us at this point.
| j-krieger wrote:
| Just out of interest, what other development-focused forums
| are there?
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Forums in general have been dying out for a while now,
| unfortunately. I think this was back in August 2015 and
| at the time, I was an active member of some now-dead
| forums on the ProBoards network and I distinctly remember
| looking at either laravel.io or the Laracasts forums to
| gauge reaction.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Never forced to continually pay for something you don't see
| value in updating.
|
| I'm glad they dialed back to this reasonable compromise. I am a
| big fan and was a paying subscriber (personally, in addition to
| a work license) when they changed licensing terms to brick the
| software when your yearly subscription was up. There was a
| predictable outrage, but they fortunately listened and changed
| to the present arrangement.
| mnahkies wrote:
| I'm a big fan of teamcity - might be because it's the first CI
| system I used professionally, but compared to Jenkins it just
| works (batteries included) and compared to circleci I find the
| configuration much less repeatitive and UI richer in terms of
| reporting / feedback.
|
| Yet to try the cloud hosted version, but it's on my list as the
| only downside for my personal usage is the minimum ram
| requirement (I try to keep my hobby projects Infrastructure as
| close to $0 cost / month as possible)
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Never used any of their TeamCity/Spaces stuff but it looks
| cool. I can definitely say I'm a fan of their IDEs though. Use
| them every day.
|
| I looked into the cloud offerings they have, the CI system is
| way more powerful than what I am using (bitbucket pipelines)
| and I'm actually pushing the limits of what I can sanely do
| there, so I may actually move over soon.
| welearnednothng wrote:
| I ran (self-hosted) TeamCity at a division of Disney for years
| with hundreds of projects across teams with lots of complex
| dependencies. To this day (though I haven't kept up as much in
| recent years), it's far and away the most powerful CI system
| I've ever used. Rock solid stability, to boot. And it's only
| become better and better over the years.
|
| Does that mean it's right for every job? Not at all. Sometimes
| you just need simple and accessible. Things like CircleCI or
| Travis or Heroku's CI. But not Jenkins. I put Jenkins into the
| same category as TeamCity, and it falls far short.
|
| If you've outgrown some of the other options and need really
| powerful CI, I can't recommend TeamCity enough.
| adsharma wrote:
| So when is kotlinc going to be rewritten in kotlin
| native/multiplatform?
|
| To be a serious competitor to rust/C++ compilation speeds matter.
| dangoor wrote:
| > The Prague-based startup, whose programming language last year
| became Google's preferred development tool for Android, is worth
| about $7 billion,
|
| Am I the only one bothered by articles describing companies like
| Jetbrains as a startup?
|
| The definition that Google gives from Oxford Languages is: "a
| newly established business." Investopedia says "The term startup
| refers to a company in the first stages of operations."
|
| This is a well-established company (founded 20 years ago,
| according to Wikipedia!) that has grown organically for years by
| offering products their users love (I'm a GoLand user myself!).
| Why use the "startup" term where it really doesn't belong?
| justsomeuser wrote:
| According to lord PG, Start up = Growth
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
| rusticpenn wrote:
| Compared to other startups like AT&T, IBM etc, Jetbrains is a
| relatively new startup.
| dxxvi wrote:
| I wish Jetbrains would lower the personal license price. I use my
| compnay license all the time but still pay Jetbrains $89 every
| year (don't know why I've been doing that for a few years
| already, should give it a second thought).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| IntelliJ is 15EUR a month, hardly expensive. A rack of good
| Augustiner beer is more expensive.
| mekster wrote:
| Personal license is already low... You'd be paying in the range
| of $10/mo. I'd rather complain to companies like Adobe to ask
| for $50/mo with their domination because of their proprietary
| file format.
| krisgenre wrote:
| I didn't even apply for a license from my company because I use
| it on my personal laptop too. Jetbrains is so good that I
| actually feel happy paying for it. Its quite ironical that I
| started my career as an Eclipse RCP developer and up until 2016
| I considered it the best IDE in the world.
| LysPJ wrote:
| I really like this quote from the CEO (Maxim Shafirov):
|
| "Basically, we wrote all this so that making software would be a
| pleasant and creative process."
| avl999 wrote:
| It is so well deserved. I have switched a few different languages
| in the last few years and everytime I start working on a new
| project in a new language, the first thing I do is lookup the IDE
| that JetBrains is vending for that language and get my manager to
| expense it. An amazing product.
| Jestar342 wrote:
| The thing that most impresses me about JetBrains' products, after
| the very real "This was made by developers" feel to them, and the
| excellent community interaction, and the regular and plentiful
| updates.. is the price. They don't price gouge their users. They
| could double their prices and still have plenty of sales (but I
| guess they'd probably lose a lot of personal licenses.)
|
| I'm sure they have actually done the numbers and perhaps even
| determined they are making more money this way, but from an
| outside/ignorant perspective it sure feels nice for a company to
| not have some MBA pushing that profit curve for all its worth and
| delivering damn good value for money for once.
| krisgenre wrote:
| .. and IntelliJ Ultimate has plugins that brings all the
| features of all of their IDEs(PHP, GO, Android, RUST, JS...)
| except CLion.
| holtalanm wrote:
| Does IntelliJ Ultimate include their C# functionality from
| Rider, as well? I used to use IntelliJ Ultimate, but I don't
| remember it including C# support.
| krisgenre wrote:
| I guess AppCode and Rider aren't included. As a Linux user
| I completely forgot they existed :).
| doyouevensunbro wrote:
| No, you have to use Rider for that. That said Rider is
| fantastic and their Unity support is top notch. Going
| between Rider for game code and IntelliJ for the backend
| was a godsend when it happened. Makes my day to day
| workload manageable.
| mamcx wrote:
| I wish the owners of Delphi go this route instead of whatever
| them do.
|
| This could have make Delphi far more popular than its now, I
| not cause a exodus of talent...
| DerDangDerDang wrote:
| They worked out that every personal licensee is an advocate, if
| not an outright evangelist for their product.
| gjvc wrote:
| Upvote 100x; I completely agree.
|
| As a counter-example look at Sencha, who have long alienated
| developers using their ExtJS toolkit, and this has deepened
| since the takeover by Idera.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| is the EXTjs tookit any good?. I am in a project where I am
| forced to use EXTJS classic ( coming from React).
| gjvc wrote:
| Probably want to stick to 4.2.1 GPL [1] (there are GPL
| versions on 5.x and 6.x but only minor point releases)
|
| I think it's great for enterprise form-fill-in
| applications. It's a complete widget set for doing in the
| browser what GUI apps from 20 years ago had in Java (for
| example)
|
| I have no interest whatsoever in writing web applications
| by using multiple components from multiple sources. I
| want to use a single toolkit. ExtJS satisfies my
| requirements. The tooling is awkward, but I've learned
| how to use it.
|
| examples
|
| "web desktop" https://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/extjs-
| build/examples/des...
|
| widget library (classic)
| https://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/extjs-
| build/examples/bui...
|
| Please shout (email in profile) if you need any help.
| Good luck!
|
| [1] http://cdn.sencha.com/ext/gpl/ext-4.2.1-gpl.zip
| rusticpenn wrote:
| My project is a frontend for a CRUD app which a huge
| database. I will definitely ask for help when I am at my
| wits end! Thank you !
| fs111 wrote:
| JetBrains is a profitable company. It has been around for 20
| years. Can we please stop calling 20 year old companies startups?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Actually I doubt that they aren't getting something out of
| Android Studio and Kotlin usage as Java replacement on Android.
| marsrover wrote:
| One of the best purchases I ever made was JetBrain's all products
| package about 6 or 7 years ago. The prices for their products
| keep going up, but I was grandfathered in at about $150.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I remember the time I noticed the UK price was significantly more
| expensive than the $ price for a piece of their software. I
| contacted their sales and they let me pay in dollars.
|
| That, plus the fact their tools are really good and really help
| me mean that I'm very happy about this news.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I noticed the UK price was significantly more expensive than
| the $ price for a piece of their software.
|
| VAT?
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Honestly I've found it to over-promise in terms of its
| capabilities. When working on code with a complex type hierarchy,
| features like click-through definitions show the wrong thing,
| which has resulted in lost productivity for me.
| canadian_tired wrote:
| I love these guys. My team adopted IntelliJ when it was still
| 1.0... 2000, 2001 maybe? Far and away the best Java IDE. I even
| got to talk them at their Booth at JavaOne in 2008... wonderful
| people. Very happy to see they have stuck it out and made it on
| their own.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Fair play to them. Their products have made my life easier for
| years without spending a cent.
| bambam24 wrote:
| Don't use Java Problem solved
| Razengan wrote:
| To quote a scene from Sunless Skies, a game in an eldtrich
| steampunk setting with a sometimes Discworld'ish wit:
|
| > _For safety reasons, all claimants must hire a hour-harker to
| escort them on the mountain. The hour-harkers all agree on the
| importance of this._
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| as a PHP developer, PhpStorm is fantastic, and knowing that
| JetBrains hired one of the most active and prominent PHP Core
| developers to let him continue working on the language is
| fantastic. Happy to pay for these apps because of that.
| cataphract wrote:
| It's not exactly clear to me why they hired Nikita Popov, but
| I'm glad he gets such free rein. I was involved with PHP
| runtime development in the beginning of the 2010s and saw as
| he, as a teenager in high-school, progressed so quickly from
| fixing some bugs to being arguably the person most advancing
| the language and the implementation (the other being Zeev,
| who's been around forever, but he's more focused on the
| implementation).
| racl101 wrote:
| Wish I could figure out how to set up Xdebug properly on MacOs.
| Most PHPStorm and Xdebug tutorials are geared for Vagrant set
| ups but not straight forward localhost on main machine.
| realmod wrote:
| I second this. I've become insanely more productive with
| PhpStorm. Well worth the money.
| mohan82 wrote:
| Happy customer for 10years. I cannot imagine how would I do
| refactor my code without Jetbrains tools
| fmakunbound wrote:
| I was using Intellij (usually referred to as IDEA back then)
| after Visual Cafe, JBuilder had died and Netbeans was shit
| (and/or still to arrive). Was worried they would be killed by
| mega-corp sponsored Eclipse. Didn't happen. They really succeeded
| with a straight-forward pay model (and now subscription model).
| Congrats to them.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| if JetBrains people are reading this, I want to say THANK YOU!
| You saved lots of developer time with IDE, then Kotlin language.
| I use Golang, Python and Database IDEs, and they are really nice
| and time saving, can't imagine how much time you guys saved to
| Java developers where everything is reflection based annotations
| and deep level of abstract class/interface implementations. (last
| time when I worked with Java in VSCode, it was almost useless for
| autocomplete, because too many things rely on annotation based
| code generation)
| GordonS wrote:
| JetBrains is one of my favourite ever companies! A few years
| back I switched from Visual Studio + ReSharper to Rider, and
| haven't looked back - it's such a fantastic, fully-featured,
| stable product. I have a personal license that let's me use
| ReSharper, Rider, dotCover, dotMemory (love this!), dotTrace.
| Some of the best money I've ever spent, and I happily renew
| year on year. I also love the pricing model that reduces the
| cost after years 1 and 2 as a loyalty bonus.
|
| And in the main, JetBrains actually seem to pay attention to
| what customers ask for in their online feedback site.
|
| I'm looking to get into either Go or Rust soon, and I'll
| definitely be using GoLand/CLion.
| codethief wrote:
| > it's such a [...] stable product
|
| Am I using a different IDE? I'm dealing with bugs in their
| refactoring engine almost every day (at least in Python and
| TypeScript); I need to invalidate the cache every other week
| because something something is not working; it's 2020 and I
| still can't configure my IDE deterministically through text
| files (which regularly results in situations where building
| the project works fine for colleague X but not for me, even
| though we seem to have the same config, so I end up having to
| delete the project and create it again). And don't even get
| me started about CPU usage...
|
| That's not to say that Jetbrains IDEs don't provide
| incredible value. They do. But I still think they leave a lot
| to be desired when it comes to stability.
| GordonS wrote:
| I haven't used PyCharm or WebStorm (you mention Python &
| Typescript, so I guess you're using them), only Rider and
| peripheral products like dotMemory and dotTrace. I mainly
| use Rider on Windows, but occasionally use it on MacOS too.
|
| I've encountered the odd issue with EAP versions of Rider
| (to be expected of course), but the release versions have
| been rock solid. Coming from Visual Studio, it's been a
| godsend!
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| How is the perf / mem usage in Rider vs VS w/ Resharper?
| hadrien01 wrote:
| I've used it on a 250-projects solution, and performance is
| much better than VS+R# or VS alone. Still not recommended,
| obviously. On smaller projects, I find also it snappier. It
| uses as much CPU as VS, and eats up more RAM.
| Scfix wrote:
| From my experience it eats up more memory. My project i avg
| around 1.2 gb in VS. vs 2.5 in Rider. But the application
| is much more responsive.
| jen20 wrote:
| How are you measuring the memory usage of each?
| GordonS wrote:
| Rider is way snappier. With VS, I'm _very_ used to
| slowdowns and even total freezes for several seconds (which
| people like to attribute to ReSharper, but IME they happen
| plenty even without ReSharper) - for a big, full-features
| IDE, once Rider has started, it feels _really_ snappy, and
| puts to bed the long-held beliefs that Java is slow.
|
| Just opened a big solution in both VS and Rider to confirm:
| - VS was really laggy after opening, pinning all 8 Xeon E3
| cores for 2 full minutes! - VS memory sitting at
| 1.3GB, plus another 0.9GB for ReSharper - Rider took
| 22 seconds to load the solution, then used a bit of CPU for
| 30s (but was totally responsive in that period) -
| Rider memory sitting at 1.1GB
|
| So assuming you use ReSharper, Rider uses a lot less
| memory, otherwise it's above the same. But still, for me
| Rider is way more responsive for editing, debugging,
| everything. And more stable too.
| swat535 wrote:
| Jetbrains products are amazing if you _need_ and IDE. Otherwise
| you're much better off using VIM or Emacs as they are open
| source, have tons of customization and plugins available and
| also they are simply lighter, faster and are available on all
| unix platforms.
| vips7L wrote:
| Java in VSCode works completely fine even with annotations, its
| the Eclipse language server. You should really give it another
| shot.
|
| In fact for all of my use cases it performs better than
| IntelliJ because it isn't trying to be 200 different tools at
| one time. With JDK 15 and ZGC my project only uses 250mb of ram
| for the language server where IntelliJ pushes over 4GB.
| arpa wrote:
| I just bought a personal IDE licence a few days ago. JetBrains
| makes one of the best IDEs I've ever used, and I consider that
| 100EUR well spent.
| [deleted]
| malux85 wrote:
| Agreed - JetBrains is one of those companies where their
| products speak for themselves, and I happily pay every year.
|
| Absolutely money well spent.
| powvans wrote:
| Yes! My JetBrains Ultimate renews every November and I get
| a little giddy in anticipation of paying them for another
| year. It's just such an amazing value. JetBrains is so good
| it's like finding money on the sidewalk.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| If you REALLY want to treat yourself, let me give you an
| address to send some bitcoin to!
| FriendlyNormie wrote:
| Is this a joke? I mean could you suck these people's
| dicks any harder? How are you a real person?
| wolco2 wrote:
| JetBrains has a great product but if you are really
| serious about "giddy in anticipation of paying them for
| another year" why not buy another subscription every few
| months? Plan a party and invite the neighbours.
| jhowell wrote:
| At a time I'd purchase both JRebel and IntelliJ. JRebel had
| a really "aggressive" sales team that would call and email
| about renewals. Jetbrains has never had to call me, their
| product sells itself, for me. I no longer use JRebel.
| risyachka wrote:
| And their pricing model is great. All products subscription
| stars $250 but after 2 years its only $150!
| malux85 wrote:
| I know it's mental. Their yearly cost pays for itself in
| productivity boost in like 1-2 days. It's such good value
| ...
| lfowles wrote:
| One of the few tools I gladly pay for a yearly
| subscription even if I only get a few weeks use out of
| it.
| clashmeifyoucan wrote:
| Agreed, and the education pack is so good. Perpetually
| free as long as you're a student has been a lifesaver--
| honestly can't live without CLion and PyCharm at this
| point.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| IntelliJ was crashing repeatedly for a few days and I was
| really sad I would have to use a different IDE until I found
| out I could change which VM was used. I've had IntelliJ even
| tho my company would have got my PHPStorm just so I could
| code during my free time in other languages in comfort.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yup! Martin Fowler mentioned them because they were one of
| the first people making automated refactoring tools. That
| sold me on their IDE, and I've been a happy user ever since
| 2001. Thee days I have the personal version of their all-you-
| can-eat license and it has always been worth the money.
|
| I'm delighted that their smarts and dedication in building a
| high-quality, user-focused product has paid off in a big way
| for them.
| golergka wrote:
| They're also one of the best IT employers in Moscow and St
| Petersburg, and guys working there create a lot of value for IT
| community both local, and russian-speaking in general. You
| don't even have to work there to feel the impact on the whole
| programming culture here.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| Moscow and St Petersberg... that is interesting. I'm a fan of
| their tools as well, but it is good to learn the Russian
| angle and take it into account.
| golergka wrote:
| Well, it is a Russian company (although not legally, for
| obvious reasons). Kotlin is named after an island just of
| the coast of St Petersburg, for example.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| JetBrains is a Czech company because the founders lived
| in Prague at the time (maybe they are still living there,
| no idea).
|
| Most of the staff is Russian though which sort of makes
| it a Russian company I guess?
| boarnoah wrote:
| Some people get a bit weirded out about the multiple IDE
| situation (mostly folks whose current day to day is VS Code
| with extensions).
|
| Usually that goes away when you get them to try some of the
| IDEs, the experience is second to none (as far as IDEs that
| work extremely well out of the box go).
|
| The amount of times I've got praised for writing neat C# code
| that was Resharper doing its magic :P
| thrower123 wrote:
| The comparison to the bad old days when the IDE answer was
| always "Install Eclipse and this set of poorly maintained
| language plugins" is night and day.
|
| The dollar-a-day I spend on the Jetbrains all-products
| subscription more than pays for itself.
| idsout wrote:
| I was one of those people up until around a couple years ago.
| Now I don't even know what I thought was such a big deal. The
| Jetbrains Toolbox makes it really simple to launch and update
| the individual IDEs.
|
| My employer pays for the ultimate license, but I will
| absolutely pay for it once I move on.
| [deleted]
| skrtskrt wrote:
| if JetBrains people are reading this, I love your products, but
| waaaay more code navigation and pane splitting/management
| features need to have keyboard shortcuts.
|
| VS Code gets this very right. It's generally not as powerful or
| friendly as JetBrains products, but the far superior keyboard
| navigation experience gets me to attempt to switch once a month
| or so.
| lolinder wrote:
| Not a JetBrains employee, but which features are you
| specifically looking for? I've never found a _single_ option
| in the IDE that 's available through a menu that cannot be
| assigned a shortcut.
| alpo20 wrote:
| I just want them to make a stand-alone git client - their 3
| way merge for merge conflicts is second to none.
| spockz wrote:
| Indeed. And it seems that it is quite separate already UI
| wise. So why not.
| koevet wrote:
| Happy for Jetbrains, I have been using their products for years
| and they did increase my productivity.
|
| Lately most of their producuts are suffering of atrocious
| performance issues, both on osx and linux [1], I hope that they
| manage to sort them out, because lots of people are now reverting
| to older versions.
|
| 1. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2732
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| I don't think it's a coincidence that Jetbrains has created a
| beloved product without the help of VC money.
|
| The longer I work in tech the more I see VC money as poison to
| good products. Because VC funded startups are forced to grow fast
| or die a lot of good, profitable, user focused ideas are trashed
| because they won't lead to rapid enough expansion.
|
| Virtually every VC startup I've worked closely with or learned
| about in detail is doing something nearly everyone would agree is
| unethical, and a fairly large amount are doing things that are
| down right illegal spared only by the fact that they aren't big
| enough to warrant prosecution or even investigation.
|
| Perpetual lip service is always paid to the notion that "we're a
| user focused company". While the mental gymnastics performed to
| convince everyone onboard that this is the case are fun to watch,
| it tragic to see nearly all good projects slowly devolving into
| ways of tricking the users... and in most cases still _losing_
| money.
|
| All of the private money companies with no plans of acquisition
| I've worked for are all amazingly sane by contrast, and create
| genuinely good products. They have to, because they need to make
| more money then they spend to survive and are fine if the happy
| place for that to happen is 30 employees.
|
| In some cases, if that product is really amazing, they become
| companies like Jetbrains.
| Taek wrote:
| Profitability isn't necessarily important to the strategy of a
| VC company. Everything is about the exit, and most exits are
| either acquisitions or IPOs. Neither type of exit mandates
| profitability, and both care capable of offloading to a greater
| fool.
|
| A strong trend I've personally noticed with VC backed companies
| and something I'm highly wary of for our own company is the way
| it inevitably turns companies evil. I would highlight Google
| and Cloudflare as two examples, but the general trend seems to
| be that VC pressure inevitably forces you to hire 'better'
| people who invariably steer the company to being more focused
| on profit and power rather than on some intrinsic mission.
|
| Actual mission focused companies like Mozilla only seem to
| succeed if they stay private and stay away from VC.
| skybrian wrote:
| Google went public early and with a share structure that
| insulated the founders from any pressure from the stock
| market.
|
| Venture capital has nothing to do with what's happened since.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Google had limited VC investment - a 25m round before IPO.
| Arguably they turned evil much later so to me the link to "VC
| corruption" is more specious.
|
| Re cloudflare, can you please help me understand what they've
| been doing that you see as evil?
|
| Given how Mozilla constantly struggles to stay afloat (and
| effectively depends on the generosity of Google as the single
| revenue source), I don't know that's an example to point to,
| especially since they've had their own share of "user-
| hostile" steps (albeit fewer since it's a smaller company).
| Taek wrote:
| I would argue that being a public company has the same
| pressure as being VC funded only much stronger.
|
| Cloudflare is increasingly pushing their position as the
| world's biggest man-in-the-middle, and things like their
| new secure DNS are making the situation worse.
|
| They've started taking opinionated stances and making
| deplatforming decisions instead of being neutral
| infrastructure and I think this is going to get a lot
| worse.
| malux85 wrote:
| I'm curious, what are the illegal (and the highly unethical)
| ones doing? Dont need to name the companies, but what sort of
| activities are you seeing?
| staysaasy wrote:
| I wonder if this shady/unethical behavior is more focused in
| consumer startups. In enterprise SaaS, for example, unethical
| behavior is a low-EV move because your customers will have
| standing to cancel their contracts or pursue you for damages.
| It's also harder to be shady under the scrutiny of 500 large
| recurring-revenue customers than 500,000 tiny ones.
| thraway2020 wrote:
| I can really relate to the parent comment. I have worked at
| two VC-funded startups, one which was an "uber of x" and the
| other is a IoT consumer electronics startup.
|
| The former was unethical in the way it treated the workers (I
| mean independent contractors). The higher ups treated the
| app/company as a beautiful product that would save the world
| (or the yuppies at least), but rarely acknowledged the actual
| workers who made the cogs spin, and was more focused on
| Growth and branding than actually treating people well.
|
| Something I always think about is the dark pattern they had
| in the app which would only ask you to rate/review on
| Yelp/app stores if you had given a 5 star rating to the job.
| They also hacked Yelp to show the Yelp option to people they
| determined were most likely to leave a good Yelp review. If
| you have a good product/service that you believe in, you
| shouldn't need to do this type of thing. Oh, and of course
| the company was not following the labor/insurance laws in the
| states where it worked and had several cease and desist
| orders they ignored.
|
| The hardware startup had like 20% RMA rates because of
| components would fail over and over. They used VC money to
| subsidize the returns/repairs instead of fixing the problem.
| They would prefer to ship more crappy products instead of
| fewer good products. Not so much illegal (hard to be when
| selling electronics, yay regulations), but unethical in that
| they would ship so much garbage despite being "customer
| obsessed." They operated more like a software company than a
| hardware company. It's easy to remotely fix software, but
| hardware is a very different beast and that was something
| they didn't want to admit.
|
| Compared to my current company, a 30 person electronics firm
| that has already been acquired and never did too much VC
| nonsense. We are profitable and sell a good product (1% RMA)
| that customers enjoy. Instead of "moving fast and breaking
| things" (a slogan I feel the first two companies embody), we
| work hard to get things just right before shipping the
| product so that we never get any returned merchandise but get
| lots of return customers.
| zdragnar wrote:
| >>> Virtually every VC startup I've worked closely with or
| learned about in detail is doing something nearly everyone
| would agree is unethical, and a fairly large amount are doing
| things that are down right illegal spared only by the fact that
| they aren't big enough to warrant prosecution or even
| investigation.
|
| Perpetual lip service is always paid to the notion that "we're
| a user focused company". While the mental gymnastics performed
| to convince everyone onboard that this is the case are fun to
| watch, it tragic to see nearly all good projects slowly
| devolving into ways of tricking the users... and in most cases
| still losing money. <<<
|
| As an anecdotal point of one, I can confirm that literally none
| of that is true for the startup I am working for, and we are
| doing quite well.
|
| Of course, it probably helps that our founders have actual
| industry and startup experience, and are not pushover adult
| children like you might find on the Silicon Valley hbo show.
| nbzso wrote:
| I will go further on VC funded companies. The Culture of
| Success is simple: If you are a founder, you have to be Perfect
| Fit, you have to design your idea around what VC's want to hear
| and this is working model. One of the reasons that I never work
| with or for startups. Founders are rarely competent to select
| the right people, in most cases they lack experience in HR or
| Product Design, etc. Bootstrapping is a detector for true
| products, you scale on a merit of real customer base not on
| some Valuable Idea for VC investment.
| jmondi wrote:
| The more I work in VC backed companies, the more I realize:
|
| VC's are not there to add value to a business, they are there
| to suck all the value out of a business.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Yes, but at least most VCs try to do it with an exit. Private
| Equity is far worse IMO
| vonmoltke wrote:
| > Because VC funded startups are forced to grow fast or die a
| lot of good, profitable, user focused ideas are trashed because
| they won't lead to rapid enough expansion.
|
| I have noticed that, to some people, "VC startup" is almost
| considered redundant. That is, if your company is not seeking
| outside investors, not seeking rapid growth, not seeking an
| "exit", then it isn't a real "startup". So, in addition to what
| you mention about user focus (or lack thereof), I feel that
| this hurts ambitious entrepreneurs by making them think the
| VC/outside investment/grow-or-die treadmill is the only way to
| get big and escape the "lifestyle business" stigma. Many of
| them likely could succeed, albeit more slowly, without the
| treadmill.
| achillean wrote:
| Completely agree and I experienced much of that on my own
| journey. Customers would ask whether I'm interested in taking
| VC or if I wanted to keep it as a "lifestyle business" - not
| realizing that we were doing more than fine without requiring
| outside funding. After a while though it nags at you and
| makes you wonder whether you should take VC because doing so
| makes building a business formulaic. Bootstrapping a company
| can feel like you're in uncharted waters in comparison
| because a lot of articles assume you've taken or want to take
| VC. And they assume that you want to exit. I wish there were
| more publicly shared success stories of bootstrapped
| companies that didn't take funding because there are more of
| them out there than people realize. And taking things slower
| can help you validate use cases, flesh out the product and
| build the type of company that you want. I'm very happy that
| we never took VC.
| LukeShu wrote:
| _> if your company is ... not seeking rapid growth, ... then
| it isn 't a real "startup"_
|
| Isn't that the definition of a "startup"? If you're not
| seeking/expecting rapid growth, isn't it just a "small
| business". There's nothing wrong with that, not everything
| has to be a "startup".
|
| (Wiktionary tells me "A new company or organization or
| business venture designed for rapid growth", but Merriam-
| Webster Collegiate 11th ed tells me "a fledgling business
| enterprise". Of course, the Merriam-Webster only recognizes
| "start-up" not "startup", so how much could they know?)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Just because it's the official definition of a start-up
| doesn't mean it's a _good_ definition.
|
| There's been a steady stream of bootstrapped companies
| providing legally and morally uncontroversial, high quality
| products to satisfied customers, and growing steadily until
| they become much bigger than "small businesses".
|
| IMO there's something deranged about the need to operate on
| the basis of explosive growth from day zero. Not only does
| it create pointless stress and drama, but it isn't even a
| particularly reliable way to grow a business - never mind
| an uncontroversial one with satisfied customers.
| cwp wrote:
| I would distinguish between growth-at-all-costs and a
| scalable business. Both are startups, but VCs only invest
| in the former. Jetbrains is a good example of the latter.
| est31 wrote:
| Is this lifestyle business stigma a real thing? Or just
| something the VC lobby put out there? Personally I think
| anyone leading a business should deserve respect, as running
| one is hard.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| It is, at least in the Valley amongst the get-rich-fast
| crowd, which is not a small portion of the people working
| here.
|
| There are a lot of things I don't like about the tech
| culture in the bay area, and this everything-but-unicorns-
| is-trash attitude is close to the top of the list.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| It's certainly part of the culture but when you make
| 6-figures a month as a bootstrapped founder, those
| arrogant a-holes quickly quiet themselves. Most of the
| fellow bootstrapped founders I've met are pretty decent
| people and there are a lot of them. I found the old money
| east coast elite to be much more annoying and far less
| interesting.
| varjag wrote:
| Yes it's the business-y equivalent of calling one small-
| minded.
| ska wrote:
| I think there are cases that are clearly "a new small
| business" vs "a startup". In between there is some fuzziness.
|
| Obviously you don't need to have or be pursuing VC money to
| be called a startup, but there is probably truth in the idea
| that startups are inherently unstable. You may not be growing
| exponentially, but you are spending down money in pursuit or
| definition of a stable business model that doesn't currently
| quite work yet, or a different way to exit that unstable
| phase.
| auganov wrote:
| A company that makes it to a few dozen employees without much
| financing is already extremely successful. You're very unlikely
| to ever work for a poorly run company without financing - they
| can't hire.
| everythingswan wrote:
| Some SMB's that I have met over the years are great at
| pretending they don't have money when hiring but are very
| profitable. I think that fits the "bad company, no financing"
| and is worth mentioning.
|
| This thread is interesting because we're talking about
| success for different people. Success for the founder? The
| money? The employees? The answers are relative to the
| stakeholder we're talking about.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yep. Most VC, if not all of them, demand quick return, and it's
| not always good for the products.
| silexia wrote:
| I have seen this firsthand. I was a finance major fifteen years
| ago and for the last ten years I have run a completely
| bootstrapped agency.
|
| If you have to live off your own revenues, it means you don't
| do any premature scaling... You have to focus on the needs of
| your customers to reach the next level. VC backed companies
| have to reach the VC exit goals which means they are forced to
| scale immediately even if things are broken.
|
| Your business idea could work really well if you were given a
| few extra months or years to work on it, but with the VC fuse
| burning you can't wait.
|
| VC's generally don't care about your passion, they care about
| maximizing returns over the shortest time period possible. If
| you don't do it their way, you will be forced to leave. I have
| been a member of a tech Vistage group and have seen over half
| of the VC backed CEO's forced out by their investors. It's
| really sad.
| drchopchop wrote:
| From first-hand experience, however, bootstrapped companies
| often don't have a ton of cash in the bank. They can quickly
| fail if there's an adverse event (COVID, for example).
|
| You can also get crushed by well-funded competitors who can
| innovate faster than you due to larger team sizes, salaries,
| etc.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > You can also get crushed by well-funded competitors who
| can innovate faster than you due to larger team sizes,
| salaries, etc.
|
| Which is why VCs are evil and need to be crushed. Ironic, I
| know, posting this here
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| VCs are a slightly less evil version of PE IMO. Don't get
| me wrong, they're still evil. Anyone who makes money from
| money should really question their place in the world.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| The best small companies operate in their direct
| competitor's blindspot.
|
| Stupid example: Tesla. Toyota reverse engineered their car.
| Can't make a competing product. Not because it is
| impossible, but because it is not how the entire supply
| chain / development is set up. It'd take Toyota a major
| restructuring of the company to be able to compete.
|
| That's the idea. It doesn't matter how much cash the other
| side throws at you, you're working where they can't go.
| Time and time again I see our company out-maneuvering our
| competitors with less money. Not because we got some super
| geniuses on the team (okay we got some smart people), but
| because we started from the ground up working in a spot
| where our competitor could not go. And so we have years of
| experience more than our competitor in the thing that our
| competitor needs to get better at.
| est31 wrote:
| In real electric car markets, other brands than Tesla run
| the show. In Norway, one of the biggest western electric
| car markets, Tesla is _way_ at the bottom of sales. Only
| 95 Teslas were sold in November, while single models of
| other manufacturers had multitudes of that number in
| sales.
|
| https://insideevs.com/news/452441/norway-plugin-car-
| sales-oc...
|
| I think Tesla's main contribution lies in the past, by
| being an early pioneer of EVs and pushing them in an
| environment where nobody considered EVs viable. This
| definitely deserves an entry in the history books. But
| competitors have waken up.
| simonh wrote:
| Maybe, but we went on a cruise to Norway last summer and
| every single time we were on the streets we saw at least
| a few Teslas. It was a game to see who could spot the
| most Teslas first.
| sharpneli wrote:
| One can perhaps think of this as Teslas blind spot.
| People living with California wages don't necessarily see
| the difference in prices mattering that much.
| theptip wrote:
| This is not a blind spot, it's explicitly part of their
| company's long-term strategy; Musk's plan from the
| beginning was to start with a luxury-tier offering
| (Roadster), and gradually work their way down the price-
| points as they achieved greater economies of scale.
|
| Musk wrote about this way back in the day (2006):
|
| https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-
| plan-j...
|
| > Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost
| before it can be optimized and this is no less true for
| electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the
| high end of the market, where customers are prepared to
| pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as
| possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each
| successive model.
|
| You might criticize their execution for failing to reach
| the mass-market sedan price-point fast enough (though I
| think that they have done an impressive job of starting a
| car company from scratch), but I don't think the "blind
| spot" claim really holds water.
| sharpneli wrote:
| Good point. So they simply were not able to ramp up
| faster than it took for the existing manufacturers to
| start catching up and leveraging their scale better.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| They seem to be ramping faster than anyone else.
|
| https://electrek.co/2020/10/30/tesla-tsla-market-share-
| globa...
|
| However they are not selling more EVs than everyone else
| in every market, which isn't a bad thing IMO. A smaller
| piece of a bigger pie is what they seem to be shooting
| for.
| theptip wrote:
| Yep, it's a classic "new market entrant is racing to
| become the incumbent before the incumbent(s) can copy
| their innovations" situation.
|
| It's a good illustration of why software is such a
| different paradigm than traditional physical economies;
| VCs can pour funding into a software company and since
| the marginal costs are close to zero, the innovator can
| blitz-scale and take over the market before the incumbent
| has time to react. However when "scaling" means building
| global logistics infrastructure, including factories for
| batteries and factories for cars, it's a lot harder to
| get the drop on the incumbents.
|
| I think the GP's comment is spot on though, if Tesla
| fails to win this race, they will still have been the
| driving force in bringing EV adoption forward by 5-10
| years (perhaps more), which is an incredible achievement.
| pkaye wrote:
| Also Musk's response during this pandemic has changed the
| tone around Tesla I think. Plus he has moved out of the
| bay area. I wonder how it will impact sales in the long
| run given California is their main market.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| Norways GDP per capita is higher than Californias.
| rory wrote:
| Disposable income seems like the more relevant number
| here, and in that California is higher ~(48k vs 38k USD,
| although numbers are a bit stale).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_pe
| r_c...
| chmod775 wrote:
| It's not more relevant, because disposable income ignores
| things Norwegians get 'free' (because it is already
| deducted).
|
| Part of that 'deduction' pays for heavy tax-breaks and
| subsidies for electric cars in Norway.
|
| But then GDP is _also_ an abhorrent metric to use for
| basically anything.
|
| If you use either GDP or 'disposable income' as a proxy
| metric to compare anything between countries, you should
| seriously re-evaluate what you're doing.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| I don't have to re-evaluate anything. I just wanted to
| tell OP that Norway is a very rich country and not in any
| way poorer than California.
| tzs wrote:
| From the article you cite:
|
| > Surprisingly, disappointing results are seen from the
| two best-selling BEVs in Europe - Renault ZOE (119) and
| Tesla Model 3 (74).
|
| I found this article [1] with sales figures for Europe.
| For H1 2020, it was 37k Renault Zoe, 32k Tesla Model 3,
| 18k VW e-Golf, then 4 in the 11-13k range, and 3 in the
| 7-8k range.
|
| [1] https://europe.autonews.com/sales-segment/europes-
| no-1-selli...
| est31 wrote:
| If you look at the greater european statistics it's not a
| _real_ electric car market any more, as most vehicles
| sold have ICE components (either hybrid or solely ICE).
| Norway is special because of their large market share of
| BEV cars. They make up 56% of new car sales in Norway
| while only 7.2% in all of the EU.
|
| So all the EU stat is saying is that Teslas are sold well
| in the niche of the market that's interested in buying
| EVs over more established brands. The Norway stat is more
| representative of what happens when 56% of all newly sold
| EU cars are purely electric.
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/03/norway-in-november-
| ev-m...
|
| https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/09/20200904-acea.ht
| ml
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Tesla's monthly sales in any specific (non-US) market are
| completely meaningless, because total demand greatly
| exceeds supply, and supply is not evenly distributed.
| That is, there are months where individual European
| markets get thousands of Model 3's, and there are months
| where those same markets get a handful, if any. This
| means that both the "OMG Tesla sales grew 15005% in
| market X!" and "LOL Tesla only sold 3 cars in market X!"
| are completely meaningless non-news from which you cannot
| derive any information.
|
| Just to drive the point home, new registrations of Tesla
| cars in Norway by month in the past 8 months: April: 44
| May: 8 June: 568 July: 348 August: 33 September: 1439
| October: 95 November: 326
|
| No, Teslas did not suddenly become hugely more popular
| during September and then immediately lose a lot of their
| popularity in the month after. It's just that in
| September, a lot more cars were allocated to Norway, and
| so a lot of the people on the waiting list finally got
| theirs. During the other months, those cars went to other
| European countries.
|
| Tesla is still ridiculously supply-limited compared to
| the amount of cars they could sell, if they only had the
| cars. Whether they succeed or not depends mostly on how
| fast they can scale their production.
| est31 wrote:
| Good point about the data being noisy, wasn't aware of
| that. If we take an entire year the core of my statement
| still holds, although more weakly. Tesla is a competitor,
| but not market leader. Other cars sell way better. Check
| the image at the bottom of this article:
| https://insideevs.com/news/452441/norway-plugin-car-
| sales-oc...
|
| 3.2k Tesla model 3's sold in 2020, but it's only at #6,
| with #1 to #5 each selling more than that, like e.g. ID.3
| with 4.4k vehicles.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Year to year changes seem to be significant. By this time
| last year, Tesla had sold ~14k Model 3s.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| It depends on the type of company. Its hard to out-innovate
| some companies just by throwing more money.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Care to tell us more about your experience with Vistage?
| silexia wrote:
| Very expensive. It's only worth it if you have over 50k a
| month in profit. At that level it is good for a year or two
| of training and then it gets repetitive.
| munchbunny wrote:
| My personal and vicarious experiences with VC's have been
| that they are very much a mixed bag, and choosing to work
| with them in general is a necessary evil depending on the
| type of company you want to build. For my future startup
| attempts, if I can help it I will not work with VC's.
|
| And if I have to work with VC's, then I will have a strong
| preference for working with VC partners who are former
| operators. The investor having substantial experience in the
| trenches (such as former founders) makes a massive difference
| in the productivity of the founder/investor working
| relationship.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| VC is like visiting sports clubs, finding the best candidates,
| and overdosing them on steroids. VC hopes the ones that survive
| will become profitable enough to pay for the ones that it
| killed.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| pg wrote a rebuttal to this in 2008:
| http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html
|
| It seems generally correct, i.e. VC works because the
| alternative sucks.
| katbyte wrote:
| Seems jet brains managed so there is an alternative that
| doesn't suck?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery, so
| therefore..."
|
| Sure, it's possible. But having met a few founders, their
| lifestyle from taking VC money seems far preferable to the
| bootstrap approach. It's true that you have to grow, but if
| you have growth, then nothing else matters. And if you
| don't, then you're one of the most employable people in the
| entire world.
|
| A shocking number of people, somehow, end up in _insane_
| amounts of debt by trying to start their own companies. And
| you 're sort of forced to. An example: one of our family
| members had a lucrative pole barn business. (Apparently in
| the midwest, lots of people wanted pole barns built, or
| something.) But in order to pay his employees to go
| construct the pole barns, he needed loans, leveraged
| against the future income from the construction project.
|
| Then 2008 hit. Poof! Contracts all went poof. And he was
| left holding the bag.
|
| So, if you need employees, and you're bootstrapped, how
| exactly are you going to pay an engineer roughly $130k per
| year? (Remember, the fully-loaded cost of an employee is
| much higher than their salary.) Loans must be so quite
| tempting.
|
| And sure, LLCs are designed to mitigate personal risk. But
| that implies you can find someone willing to risk loaning
| to you.
|
| I'm not saying that VC is great, just that it fills a need.
| GVIrish wrote:
| Yeah but all the successful VC funded startup stories are
| a form of survivorship bias too. The whole idea of
| venture capital is to fund many companies that will fail
| with the hope of finding the one unicorn that will make
| up for all the losses. A lottery just the same.
|
| It's true that if you're taking out loans to fund your
| bootstrapped company you could be left holding the bag.
| But it's also true that you can build an IT startup
| without taking a lot of big loans for capital
| expenditures. You only grow when you're making money, so
| it's a slower path, but for some businesses it may make
| more sense.
| signal11 wrote:
| > That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery,
| so therefore..."
|
| Caveat: I love Jetbrains, and am a happy subscriber.
|
| However, as the parent commenter says, it's important to
| realise that Jetbrains has been lucky as well. Java dev
| tools suffered from poor performance and poor UX for the
| longest time.
|
| Eclipse, despite its early promise (SWT and native
| widgets) has much 'rougher' UX compared to IDEA. But I
| remain surprised how much better even simply typing feels
| on IDEA, and how good the refactoring tools are. (The
| latest Eclipse has improved a lot in the refactoring
| dept, though.)
|
| Java's combination of openness and poor dev tools
| definitely helped Jetbrains a lot and gave them a cachet
| in the marketplace that helped them as they expanded into
| other languages. That said, I've also used their
| Microsoft VS addins and those were very good too, but
| they likely would have made much less money if they were
| a Microsoft-only shop.
| Razengan wrote:
| What you're saying is like "I have never won the lottery,
| so therefore it must be impossible..."
| edoceo wrote:
| Or, don't start a business with a loan. If you're gonna
| bootstrap (the "right" way) then step zero is have 12mo
| runway of your own capital and step one is start a
| business
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| $130k to pay a single employee for one year. I don't know
| about you, but it's extremely difficult for most people
| to save up that kind of runway.
| edoceo wrote:
| Saving up money to start a business is just one of the
| many (many!) difficulties you will face when
| starting/running your own business.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > $130k to pay a single employee for one year. I don't
| know about you, but it's extremely difficult for most
| people to save up that kind of runway.
|
| I think the idea is that step one _isn 't_ hiring a
| subordinate employee; it's having secure enough finances
| that you (or you and your co-founders) can work for
| yourself for a time.
|
| Step two is actually working on the business, and step
| three is growing is revenues to the point where it can
| sustain you, four is growing them further to the point
| where they can support an employee, and _five_ is
| actually hiring that employee and paying them $130k a
| year.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Co-founders? Why are they co-founding? Profit sharing?
|
| That's an excellent way to devolve into squabbling about
| who gets what. VC also protects against that: the money
| is for the company, and it's illegal to siphon it out of
| the company.
|
| Unfortunately in practice your suggestion tends to become
| "You're working for yourself, alone." And sure, I love
| the idea of a one-person company. Lots of talented devs
| can sell, if they try. But lots of talented devs are also
| trying to get rich on the iOS app store; few do.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Co-founders? Why are they co-founding? Profit sharing?
|
| Because they had an idea with you and want to work
| together to make it happen? Or all kinds of other things
| like that?
|
| And yeah, if you're going to do that, you're going to
| have to be careful make sure you're not the kind of
| people who will need adult supervision to avoid
| squabbling.
|
| VC might have its uses, or provide some service, but that
| shouldn't be misunderstood to mean that it's essential or
| alternatives aren't worth considering.
|
| The other thing to note is that one of the things VCs do
| is _sell the VC paradigm_ , so they're going to try their
| hardest to make it _seem_ like it 's essential or at
| least the best product out there.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Hmm. You're dodging the question: Why would a cofounder
| want to start a company with you? No handwaving.
|
| People cofound to get rich. Can your company offer that
| to your cofounder?
|
| If you focus on that question, the rest falls into place.
| Unfortunately a lot of people don't want to focus on that
| question, because it's at the heart of why bootstrapping
| rarely works.
|
| "Not needing adult supervision" indicates that you
| probably haven't done what you're saying. It's not a
| matter of supervision. It's managing expectations. You
| are legally required to lay out what you offer, in clear
| terms, and what you expect in return. That's the basis of
| a business arrangement.
|
| So, we're going into business together. How will your
| company make me rich? Why should I work as hard as I
| possibly can to make the company succeed?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Hmm. You're dodging the question: Why would a cofounder
| want to start a company with you? No handwaving.
|
| > People cofound to get rich. Can your company offer that
| to your cofounder?
|
| I don't know. Why did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start
| Apple together?
|
| I feel like you're laboring under a very limited model of
| how and why companies are founded and how people behave.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| The model happens to be aligned with how and why people
| actually start companies. It's not my model.
|
| You have to come up with a persuasive answer to "Why
| should I work as hard as I can on this company, rather
| than go work for Google?" That question is in fact so
| hard that it (possibly) almost killed YC in the crib,
| back in '08. No one wants to work for a startup when they
| can get paid far more and live an easier life.
|
| What you're proposing, if I understand you correctly, is
| that someone works extremely hard, for no concrete gain
| other than perhaps intellectual curiosity. Sure, you can
| argue that the usual benefits apply: you're free to do as
| you please, and to self-manage. But that's not a very
| convincing argument in the face of $RIDICULOUS_SALARY at
| a bigco.
|
| It's cliche to say "Don't hate the player, hate the
| game," but I believe it applies here. Neither of us chose
| to live in a capitalistic society. We were born into one.
| Why not make the optimal decisions, all else being equal?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > The model happens to be aligned with how and why people
| actually start companies. It's not my model.
|
| That someone else created the model and you believe it
| doesn't mean it's true.
|
| > You have to come up with a persuasive answer to "Why
| should I work as hard as I can on this company, rather
| than go work for Google?" That question is in fact so
| hard that it (possibly) almost killed YC in the crib,
| back in '08. No one wants to work for a startup when they
| can get paid far more and live an easier life.
|
| Actually, I don't. Honestly, you seem kind of set in your
| thinking, and I don't think it's worth the effort to try
| to figure out how to persuade you out of your
| misconceptions. There are counterexamples even in this
| subthread that falsify your model. It's up to you to
| either be open to them or not.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Statistically you are right that big tech currently
| provides the best expected value for a programmer, but in
| practice people's decisions aren't based on a single
| criteria. A lot of people find working for Google soul
| crushing and would happily take a $100k job that gives
| them more control and impact versus trying to navigate
| the path to promotion and relevance in a sea of stillborn
| products at Google.
|
| I also agree founders want to get rich, I mean who
| doesn't? It's a nice fantasy. However if they don't have
| a deeper motivation to solve a problem for its own sake
| they will fail. If you're super smart and just want to
| get rich, the right move is to go into finance because
| you'll never cross the chasm of building something people
| actually want. Even the language you use to describe the
| premise indicates you don't really get what makes
| successful founders tick. Founders don't "work for a
| startup" and they don't need to be convinced--the whole
| point is these are people who have decided for one reason
| or another that they are passionate about building a
| company. You might think them fools because 25yo
| engineers are making $500k at FAANG and that is a high
| bar to clear for any startup (it is), but consider that
| all SWEs under 35 have never known a recession, and they
| may have come to believe that a programmer is inherently
| worth $500k even though this is just market rate given
| todays demand. If there is another dot-com style
| correction, a bunch of folks might find out real quick
| what the value of knowing how to make your own dollar is.
| Frondo wrote:
| > Why not make the optimal decisions, all else being
| equal?
|
| Money isn't everything. For a lot of people, it isn't
| even a top 5 consideration.
| [deleted]
| cercatrova wrote:
| They co-found to make money. It's just not as fast paced
| as the VC option but it's the same thing as any business.
| The founder thinks that with more than 1 person, each
| person would make more money than if only the founder
| worked.
| threedots wrote:
| I am a cofounder of a non-VC backed startup. We work
| together because (1) we're friends (2) like working
| together (3) have complimentary skillsets. We split the
| equity 50/50 and receive the same salary. We've been
| doing it several years and we've never had even a single
| conversation on the topic, we just assumed from the
| beginning it was an even split and that's how we went
| about it.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> But in order to pay his employees to go construct the
| pole barns, he needed loans, leveraged against the future
| income from the construction project._
|
| Rather than collateralized loans, a better financial
| instrument might have been factoring (selling the
| receivable outright, typically for 90-95C/ on the
| dollar), plus having a reasonable penalty clause in the
| contract.
|
| This isn't a criticism. Hardly anyone outside of the
| fashion industry (that has long waits, like net-90, for
| payment after eventual delivery) or heavy industry (that
| has expensive equipment that can be amortized long-term)
| seems to know about factoring.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| No one will loan to an LLC without a personal guarantee
| from the founder. LLCs protect against legal liability,
| not against financial liability for debt.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Have you entertained the idea that both could suck?
| klik99 wrote:
| This is probably it. There are some companies that just
| can't be bootstrapped, the up-front cost is too high. There
| are some that would suffer from the high-growth demands of
| VC. If you've got a plan that starts with high-fixed costs
| that over time becomes low-fixed cost at scale, then VC is
| probably the best way to go. If you've identified low-
| hanging fruit to solve problems for people, bootstrapping
| makes the most sense.
|
| Any arguments for or against seem to imply either way is a
| one-sized fits all solution. It's not.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| PG is a VC. He isn't a god of entrepreneurship.
|
| Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to software
| and not to all of the other kinds of businesses out there?
| bostik wrote:
| > _Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to
| software?_
|
| Maybe because software has a unique property: a practically
| zero marginal ("reproduction") cost. Hence software, and
| services that depend _only_ on software are suitable for
| the rocket-fuel injection strategy VCs so heavily rely on.
|
| Make no mistake - good software is damn expensive to
| create, but once it's ready for delivery, creating and
| selling additional copies (or serving more clients) costs
| practically nothing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the distribution costs nothing but six months old
| software is still six months old software. Pushing half
| finished products on the entire world is another
| 'feature' hailed by people like PG. I thought we had all
| learned how great "move fast and break things" and "when
| it works you're shipping too late" is for us at this
| point.
|
| There was a good article on HN recently about 500 year
| old Japanese family owned businesses. Most hypergrowth
| software probably doesn't live five. Isn't it interesting
| that most of the software that actually has lived decades
| looks more like it's made by people like that rather than
| VC fuelled companies?
| ganeshkrishnan wrote:
| Also as humans we are myopic and can only understand
| everything as a relation to us. His tweet
| (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657)
| about how you don't need to be rich to run a startup
| invariably shows that as humans we are poor at judging
| almost anything out of our current circle of understanding.
|
| The major major thing that makes a startup successful in
| almost all cases is money. With enough wind even chickens
| can fly.
|
| There are millions of brilliant people all over the world
| whose ideas we never see because they never had their
| opportunity or funding to bring their ideas to life.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > With enough wind even chickens can fly.
|
| Off topic: I'm not familiar with this turn of phrase, but
| as anyone who has ever chased after free range chickens
| as a child knows - chickens fly fine with no wind at all.
| The can only fly a short distance though.
| est31 wrote:
| 200 years ago, railway was the big thing. Everyone was
| interested in building railways, steam engines, etc.
| Companies sprung up, many people got rich. Nowadays, the
| railways are already built and transport many goods.
| Building new railways is extremely expensive now because we
| have lost the know how, workforce, have higher labour
| standards, bureaucracy etc. Nowadays we are mainly
| considering how to operate railway tracks instead of
| building new ones.
|
| Nowadays, software is the new economic frontier and enjoys
| explosive growth. The land that software embarks into is
| still virgin, and it's comparatively easy to build a new
| software company. It's a growth market.
|
| In such an environment, bootstrapped companies are
| generally at a disadvantage to VC started companies, as
| bootstrapped ones can focus on capturing the market before
| becoming profitable, while bootstrapped ones have to keep
| both in mind. So people turn to VCs.
|
| This situation of explosive growth is kinda unique to
| software, and VCs aren't the only solution to the problem,
| but the dot com bubble has shown what happens when
| companies go public more early on in the process.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| I don't see the rebuttal.
|
| The article seems to be only about what the best way of
| selling your company is (whether or not you technically
| sell).
|
| There isn't even anything in it about just running your own
| company indefinitely.
|
| And the article does not mention "user" or "good software"
| once, staying only within an economical framework ("how to
| get rich") - which is literally the point of GP.
| vortegne wrote:
| Well PG also loves the smell of his own proverbial farts.
| brundolf wrote:
| > I don't think it's a coincidence that Jetbrains has created a
| beloved product without the help of VC money
|
| I don't think the surprise is that they made a good product
| without VC, I think the surprise is that they made ten figures
| off the back of nothing but a good product
|
| ...which should tell us something about the industry
| rcardo11 wrote:
| Some people are calling Jetbrains a startup. Hell no, this is
| just a normal company which builds great products. Making me
| realize that the shortest definition of startup is VC-backed-
| product or even worse, VC-backed-potential-product.
| FpUser wrote:
| I tried to use their CLion IDE for C++ development but had
| numerous problem preventing me from working. The company was
| responsive and tried to help me, no complaints in this
| department, but I lost my patience pretty fast as I was not
| willing to invest significant time into making things work that
| should've worked right out of the box.
| tuankiet65 wrote:
| Do you mind sharing your experience? My experience with Clion
| has been great so far, but I understand that Clion is somewhat
| opinionated on the project structure (for example, only CMake
| support), so it might not work well with existing projects.
| FpUser wrote:
| Problems with crashing while debugging, inability to debug,
| etc. Do not remember details as it was more than a year ago
| and as I've said I was not willing to spend much time on
| that.
| devin wrote:
| Could we get a title change? This is a private company and it is
| not actively being marketed for sale. The founders are not
| billionaires.
| InvOfSmallC wrote:
| Being a Dev, I get the company paying for my tools but otherwise
| they will be money well spent. I use everything, from dB to
| Goland to Idea.
| leetrout wrote:
| I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago
| after meeting some of their team at GopherCon.
|
| I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that
| point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other
| posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked
| about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at
| me and said "Ok, thanks".
|
| Something so empty and almost a pretentious kind of tone when it
| was said was a massive turnoff. Why even come to a conference if
| you don't want to engage with your users?
|
| I don't expect my story to change any hearts or minds and I still
| use their tools when a company provides them for Java work but
| I've replaced my usage of their other tools with VS Code and
| plug-ins for my personal projects.
| [deleted]
| Gybtb wrote:
| "...In addition to all that I'd like a blowjob too if that's
| not too much to ask."
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Well this is pretentious as hell
| dlsniper wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear that. We really strive to talk to everyone we
| can, and we are happy to hear all the stories from subscribers,
| or otherwise. Feedback, and more importantly, meeting with
| people is why we go to conferences.
|
| Can you please remember at which GopherCon / year this
| happened?
|
| I'm usually part of all the conferences teams and I can say
| that at conferences such as GopherCon US 2019, I speak daily
| with 200-300 people easily at the booth.
|
| All of our booth staff is developers + myself (Developer
| Advocate) and from time to time we are joined by our Product
| Marketing Manager.
|
| It's not an excuse for this type of reply, and I believe that
| nobody should be treated like this.
| malux85 wrote:
| Cutting off the nose to spite the face
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Is it possible the booth was ran by marketing and not
| developers? Either way thats pretty awful.
| sheepz wrote:
| Perhaps it was run by some introverted developer-types? Or
| there were some cultural differences at play? The reaction
| seems a bit excessive and I'm not sure if it characterizes the
| company as a whole.
| [deleted]
| c06n wrote:
| Could be possibly because they were Czech? The culture is very
| different from what Americans are used to. Very reserved, very
| matter-of-fact, no smalltalk.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Jetbrains is mostly Russian. Their main development center is
| in St. Petersburg (Kotlin is actually a name of the island in
| St. Petersburg archipelago).
| manyxcxi wrote:
| Not to invalidate the way you feel about that interaction, but
| putting myself in their shoes- I'm not sure my response would
| be much better.
|
| Running a booth at a conference is EXHAUSTING. Also, that was
| your first interaction with them and you were at peak
| excitement. That might've been the thousandth time they had
| heard similar and their spark may have faded by the time you
| got there.
|
| I get it though, we feel the way we feel. It sucks when your
| enthusiasm goes un-matched. I've written off companies for
| interactions a more objective bystander might charitably
| forgive.
|
| BTW- I've got no relation to the company or product. I'm just a
| happy customer who's run a booth or two in my day and also felt
| the same way as you about other companies too.
| [deleted]
| 0dmethz wrote:
| You stopped using their tools because some people at a
| conference didn't respond enthusiastically enough to your
| praise?
| simion314 wrote:
| Maybe is a culture/language thing. Because I am not a native
| English speaker and I almost never have to speak (only read and
| write) when we have a video conference I always express myself
| with few words because I am aware how terrible I sound so I
| will use a lot of OK,Yes, Sure ...
| jansan wrote:
| Yes, those Russians can be quite blunt. I once found a great
| library maintained by a Russian guy that had zero issues on
| Github. I created an issue for a feature request and was
| brushed off with unexpected rudeness. Later I looked at this
| again and found that he was absolutely correct with his
| argument and his communication was just very efficient and I
| am sure he did not mean to be rude.
| seg_lol wrote:
| I am glad my personal site license enables such awesome.
| Jetbrains is a wonderful company and I hope they continue to
| retain agency over their customer focus.
| dr_faustus wrote:
| Very, very well deserved! Great software at very reasonable
| prices. I had the ultimate collection (or whatever the package
| including all IDEs is called) for 3 or 4 years and it even
| encourages me to try out new languages once in a while. Its an
| excellent offering!
| neillyons wrote:
| Well deserved. I love PyCharm Professional Edition. I remember I
| got their "startup discount" which is 50% for one year, even
| though I was just starting a limited company to freelance.
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/store/startups/
| ATsch wrote:
| Two more policy failures!
| arooaroo wrote:
| IntelliJ is great, PyCharm is good. But RubyMine is the one I've
| used daily for years and it's a bit of a dog's dinner and I think
| getting progressively worse over the years.
|
| I've been summarising issues lately:
|
| - https://andyroberts-uk.medium.com/rubymine-code-insights-or-...
|
| - https://medium.com/swlh/rubymine-more-distractions-part-2-24...
| syspec wrote:
| I love JetBrains IDE's...
|
| Huge fan, have the all products subscription for years and use
| multiple of their IDE's simultanously and try to convince anyone
| who will listen why these are just better IDEs, which is why they
| should pay for it.
|
| However, please please, bring back the old "local changes" view.
| It is a huge part of the workflow when coding. I don't know of a
| single person who thought it needed to be changed, but everyone
| i've discussed it with wishes it was returned to the previous
| style.
|
| For the record, you can revert it (for now) by going to: Settings
| > Version Control > Commit > "Use non-modal commit interface"
| tekkk wrote:
| It reads that they raised no external funding whatsoever? Is that
| true? If so, how? Did they just code an app and start immediately
| selling it, working another jobs until it become enough
| profitable to support them full-time? It sounds quite implausible
| that they did not receive any funding, but I guess it could be
| true. Very impressive achievement nonetheless.
| brentm wrote:
| It looks like they started by selling a Java tool called
| IntelliJ Renamer. Likely just bootstrapped that and then
| reinvested the profits.
|
| They only switched over to the SaaS model maybe five or six
| years ago, before that you'd buy one copy the application and
| then buy a newer version when you felt like it. Now you're
| basically buying a new copy every year no matter what, just
| like everything else.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I wouldn't say it is SaaS model. You own a licensed copy
| pinned at version forever without extra pay and also for
| offline use. I would rather call it annual upgrade
| subscription software.
| renewiltord wrote:
| No, their current licensing thing becomes the other one after
| a year. For instance if I stopped paying I'd have IntelliJ
| IDEA 2019 forever.
|
| There was a huge controversy when they switched and the
| backlash made them re-evaluate to this which I think is a
| fair license.
| brentm wrote:
| I've been paying for it for a while and I didn't actually
| know that. I thought after I stopped paying it would be
| unlicensed and bricked. Either way though I think the
| upgrades are probably worth paying for.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you login and look, they'll say "Perpetual Fallback
| License for X". That X is what you'll be able to use for
| life.
|
| And I agree with you on the upgrades.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > It reads that they raised no external funding whatsoever?
|
| It sounds strange now but I suspect for most of history this
| was true of businesses large and small. I wonder when external
| funding became "the rule" for successful companies rather than
| the exception?
| avarun wrote:
| This is false. How could the common person have possibly had
| the capital to start their own business without external
| funding prior to the 20th century? No, they all had to rely
| on bank loans, which were arbitrary and capricious, as well
| as required collateral that made it a very risky proposition
| to start a company. Venture Capital by comparison is a
| miracle of the modern world, allowing you to start businesses
| risk-free.
| OJFord wrote:
| Bank loans used to be more significant and commonplace
| though.
|
| And probably historically it would be (even) more likely to
| be significantly self-funded as opposed to being all but
| unfunded and 'bootstrapping', that's my impression anyway.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Bank loans are still used for many more conventional small
| businesses.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And this is what the modern VC fueled world has brought us to.
|
| Why is it impossible to believe that a company can start small,
| become profitable and grow without VC funding? This is how the
| vast majority of businesses become successful.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| The company I currently work for also started this way to my
| knowledge, and I think we're better off for it. It may be
| harder than getting funding right from the start, but I
| wouldn't say it's implausible.
| spullara wrote:
| I'm surprised that I don't see more of the HN typical anti-Java
| stance where the wisdom on here is that you can't build UI
| applications in Java. Here is a $7B company built entirely with
| Java Swing providing (IMHO) the best developer tools across
| almost all languages. Recently, JetBrains gave me an unlimited
| lifetime license for all their software because I have been a
| loyal customer for 17 years - very generous. And yes, I would
| have loved to invest in them anytime along the way but their low
| burn rate being headquartered in eastern europe makes that pretty
| unnecessary. They have probably been profitable from the
| beginning.
|
| Another thing missing from the discussion is whether they are
| sharing equity (or profits) with their employees. That is also a
| hallmark of VC funded businesses and one that is often not
| present in bootstrapped companies. Generally all the economics
| are consumed by the owners.
| jfengel wrote:
| I did not realize that it was Swing, since they're not using
| the Metal L&F. I always wanted to like Swing, but the look and
| feel were never very good. IntelliJ feels great.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| IntelliJ (and the rest of the JetBrains editors) is the only
| editor I've found with legitimately good emacs keybindings.
| They're not perfect but they're so much better than the VSCode or
| Sublime ones. They feel like bindings written by someone who
| actually uses and likes emacs.
|
| JetBrains genuinely feels like a company run by people who love
| programming languages and love tooling. How many companies would
| actively fund a homotopy type theory group^[1]?
|
| [1]: https://research.jetbrains.org/groups/group-for-dependent-
| ty...
| DidISayTooMuch wrote:
| Where would I be without RubyMine?
| rbreaves wrote:
| Heh, their app was the only IDE I went in and added support for
| when it came to porting macOS keybinds over to Windows and Linux
| lol. I had no idea they have grown to be so popular and are fully
| owned still by the original founders.
|
| I have support for VSCode and Sublime Text 3 as well of course,
| but they're not IDEs.
|
| https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto/blob/master/windows/kinto....
| karmajunkie wrote:
| i keep going back to emacs/vim for coding, but jetbrains in one
| of the few bigger vendors about whom i've got nothing bad to say,
| ever. i love their tools, just prefer the terminal. one of my
| teammates did get me to convert from psql to datagrip for most of
| my data work. that alone is a testament to the quality of the
| tools!
| llcoolv wrote:
| Fair play to them. They are in a bit of a bubble here in Prague
| as noone from my Czech/EU network has worked for them, but still
| the product is great, their treatment of community - excellent
| and I wish them best of luck in the future as well.
|
| P.S. I am currently shilling for Jetbrains Spaces to the
| leadership :D
| cryptica wrote:
| This is a huge achievement because "without VC help" literally
| means "All VCs and all their corporate friends actively working
| to destroy you".
|
| Maybe they succeeded because they got things going a long time
| ago. I doubt they would succeed if they started only a couple of
| years ago. They would have been crushed by the VC-corporate
| complex.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Good! Not all companies need the grow-at-all-costs mentality that
| comes with VC funding.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| Yes! I have been using Jetbrains since college in 99 and have
| sold hundreds of copies by converting dev teams to it over the
| years. Its simply, hands down, the best IDE! Stay pure guys!
| freakynit wrote:
| Started using jetbrains ide around 7-8 years back. Couldn't
| leave. Tried vscode, netbeans, Atom, eclipse(2nd chance), online
| ide's, just nothing comes even distant close to jetbrains ide.
| Can't even think of coding in java without this. This thing just
| works. Very well deserved valuations.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| I wonder what they are paid by Google to help in maintaining
| Android Studio.
| buybackoff wrote:
| Their open source free pack is so great, many many thanks to
| them!
|
| And they kill two birds with one stone. First, they support open
| source, which is great. Second, they increase conversion and
| loyal userbase. At my job I had a choice between Visual Studio +
| Resharper vs Rider, and I was reluctant to move from VS to
| IntelliJ IDEA based IDE, thinking R# is good enough and gives the
| same benefits inside a familiar IDE. I was so wrong, after trying
| Rider at home occasionally and pair coding at job, I gradually
| migrated. The IDE itself is much better, faster, nicer is big and
| very small details. Now there is no way back to VS, but that may
| not have happenned without the access at home. Other tools from
| the Toolbox are doing the same for other languages. Very smart of
| them to be so generous. Now even if my free pack is not renewed,
| I will pay for myself. And for foreseeable future I will generate
| at least one license at work for them.
| rcardo11 wrote:
| I'd like to understand how these guys make money, I've used the
| free version of IntelliJ for years and never required anymore
| than this! Does people actually buy licenses ?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, they are cheap (for US professionals, at least). I've
| subscribed to their products for over half a decade now and
| have it on auto-renew without thinking.
| mekster wrote:
| If you take the personal license, from 3rd year, you only pay
| $15/mo for everything they got.
|
| Thank god they don't do Adobe and make a single app cost
| $50/mo or some such stupid pricing.
| trotFunky wrote:
| Some of the language specific IDEs do not have a free
| (community) version like CLion for C/C++ or Rider for
| C#/.NET/Unity (and Unreal Engine in the near future) and bring
| a lot to the table for those languages.
|
| I am a heavy user of CLion and enjoyed my education license
| while I was in engineering school, I will happily buy a
| personal license when it expires !
| imhoguy wrote:
| I do Java, Ruby, Go, Clojure, Python, k8s gigs or side
| projects. For 150EUR/yr I get solid always current workbench
| with many specialized flavours (IDEA, RubyMine, GoLand,
| PyCharm) and consistent UX. Moreover there are quality 3rd
| party plugins available for K8s yamls or Clojure (Cursive).
| fgonzag wrote:
| I've had a personal all tool license since they switched to the
| licensing model. 150 / yr is reasonable for me to be able to
| use their tools on my personal projects, and also not having to
| pester my bosses about getting a license whenever I change
| jobs.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Well deserved. Their products are just genius, and they help
| everyone get 5x more productive. With the Community Edition range
| of IDEs that they have, I already feel they're doing charity.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I had my own personal license for Resharper across three jobs
| because it was much easier just to pay for it myself than try to
| justify my company to expense it.
|
| I would hate going to another developer's computer trying to show
| them something and then realize the feature I was using was part
| of R# instead of Visual Studio. It was painful.
|
| Now that I have left the C# world for Node, Python and AWS,
| VSCode with plug-ins are more than adequate.
|
| JetBrains and Hashicorp are definitely two of my favorite
| companies in the Dev/Devops space.
| closeparen wrote:
| My company's codebase is rapidly becoming too much to compile or
| even index locally. The official solution is to develop in cloud
| VMs. I expect I will be on of the last holdouts using my MacBook
| Pro as a space heater: you will pry the Jetbrains IDEs out of my
| cold dead hands.
|
| I just hope they get strong client/server support at some point.
| spamizbad wrote:
| On Earth 2 where Jetbrains took VC money there's an ambitious
| product manager pushing his team to finish a built-in music
| player (along with 2 gigs of royalty-free lofi beats) as the
| issue logs backs up with angry customer complaints about poor
| language server integrations, crashing, and general slowness.
| varispeed wrote:
| Sometimes I used to think that the rich used to lobby governments
| to create more regulation, so that creating any new business in a
| space they have their own players would be extremely expensive
| and thus warrant the need of VC capital to even start. On the
| other hand when I see how companies abuse their position I can
| see that the regulation is very much needed. Now there seems to
| be a disconnect between how smaller businesses are regulated and
| how big business is essentially left to do as they please as they
| become too big to fail. How or what is at fault? Is it possible
| to have a level playing field so that smaller businesses can
| compete on the same level as big guys and gals?
| asdojasdosadsa wrote:
| A year using IntelliJ for React/Node and still trying to find my
| way around the IDE (IntelliJ). It seems powerful as is, but I
| feel like I'm not using it to the full extent
|
| Any tips?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Try some of the refactoring options. It's the only IDE I know
| that automatically takes care of all the references if I move
| files, but especially _functions and classes_ around.
|
| We had a huge file with tons of functions inside, and using
| Intellij it was a simple matter to move them all to their own
| files (and not have to update any imports anywhere).
| dukeofharen wrote:
| One thing that helped me in the beginning was the plugin "Key
| Promoter X" which suggests keyboard shortcuts on every action.
| cabirum wrote:
| Try opening the included "learn webstorm" interactive project.
| brabel wrote:
| I can't find it right now, but there's a video from a
| conference where one of the IntelliJ developers show how to
| work with it productively... it really changed how I use it and
| made me much better at it.
|
| One of the things that struck me the most was that you
| shouldn't use tabs... They are very inefficient at navigating
| between files... Use the file switcher (Cmd+E on Mac) to switch
| between recent files, or type search (Cmd+O on Mac, followed by
| initial letters of the words, e.g. to find FooBarClass type
| 'fbc') for anything else... and disable tabs in preferences.
|
| Another good one is to use `Cmd+Shift+A` to search by action
| (e.g. Cmd+shift+A > "show bytecode")... with time you either
| start remembering the shortcut which is shown when you select
| the action, or you just get used to searching it this way which
| takes just a second anyway. One more hint: navigate between
| implementation/definition using Cmd+B on Mac (don't remember
| the Windows/Linux shortcut) which alternates between the two
| things, so you can go back and forward using just that! Talking
| about moving back/forwards, on Mac, use Cmd+[ to go back to
| previous lines you were editing, and Cmd+] to go forwards again
| (very handy to look back at what you had been doing before then
| moving back where you stopped).... oh, there's so much more...
| just watch some videos on YouTube and practice the hints you
| like the most.
| tpetry wrote:
| That sounds really interesting. If anybody finds it, i would
| happy to learn better how to use their products.
| brabel wrote:
| oh, found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8wRC7Qkcb8
|
| It's old , but it should still help a lot.
| avh02 wrote:
| My personal way of learning about any IDE/etc is when i see
| something interesting in the options/settings/shortcuts or if i
| accidentally do something odd i think "huh, what is that?" - i
| try it, and if i like what it does, i try to remember it for
| next time.
|
| one at a time you build up an insane amount of muscle memory.
| you can't memorize all the things. it's also one of the reasons
| i use eclipse shortcuts in pycharms (don't want to rewire
| muscle memory)
|
| edit: this is ~5 years in to pycharms and i still occasionally
| learn new things.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I feel this way about just about every IDE and editor I've ever
| used.
| cplan wrote:
| I'd say, don't disable the tips that show at startup and try to
| incorporate them into your workflow. Maybe make some notes of
| the ones that seem most useful and try to refer back to them,
| before long you'll find your fingers remember the shortcuts.
| shay_ker wrote:
| What do Jetbrains customers mostly use?
|
| From my understanding, it's mostly Intellij and GoLand, and some
| PyCharm. At least two of the three are languages that are every
| difficult to be productive in with Sublime or Vim alone.
|
| I guess PyCharm allows you to stop thinking about whitespace? In
| seriousness, not trying to start another holy war.
| mekster wrote:
| What language can you even be much proficient with Vim compared
| to JetBrains?
|
| Vim is only good for editing config files.
| fgonzag wrote:
| Rider is great. You do have VsCode competing in that space, but
| I still like Rider better as an actual IDE. Though VsCode with
| vim mode is my default lightweight editor now.
| brentm wrote:
| RubyMine & WebStorm are both great products.
| shay_ker wrote:
| sure, i'm wondering how many people pay for them though
| fgonzag wrote:
| I know of quite a few developers in Mexico who pay for it
| out of pocket because of how much they like it and how much
| it improves their efficiency.
|
| I'm talking people on 40-50k salaries top.
| shay_ker wrote:
| show me the data!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Everyone I know who pays for them just buys the "All
| Products" pack. The loyalty discount just makes it a no-
| brainer.
| einrealist wrote:
| Jetbrains is one of the few tool vendors that do not have to
| aggressively market their way into our tech stacks. That alone is
| a key indication of how good and useful their products are. Great
| that this is rewarded. I really hope that they will stay this way
| and grow organically rather than with force.
|
| (Long-term user/customer here. I am using IntelliJ since like
| version 2 (with some gaps).)
| ckosidows wrote:
| Hopping on the IntelliJ love train. I've been using it for the
| last five years. It is the one piece of software I still get
| excited about. Heck they've even made fonts interesting.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| This is a great point. Every time a new tool comes out (Atom,
| VSCode, etc.) I find myself eventually going back to IntelliJ
| because 1) it just works 2) the customer service is great 3)
| reasonably priced and 4) it works _with everything_ and _on
| everything_.
| hinkley wrote:
| I strongly believe their single user license was responsible
| for a lot of their success.
|
| One of the dynamics that has made open source such a juggernaut
| is a consequence of the 'give a man a little power': Those with
| the purse strings making strategic decisions for the company
| without considering the benefits of buying a piece of software.
|
| "I won't pay for that." could be answered with "That's okay,
| it's free!"
|
| Jetbrains isn't free, but the license explicitly binds the copy
| to your person, not your location or computer. I can have my
| private copy running at work and left open on my personal
| computer at home.
|
| You won't pay for my IDE? That's okay, I already have a
| license.
| yashap wrote:
| Agreed, they're definitely a "stand on the strength of our
| products" company. IntelliJ IDEA is not just the best IDE I've
| ever used, it's one of the best software products I've used,
| period.
|
| Also, they've got a great open source license program!
| https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/#support
| jansan wrote:
| And not to forget that their strongest competitors were
| Eclipse, backed by IBM, and NetBeans, backed by Sun
| Microsystems. To stand your ground against two enterprise
| backed open source alternatives as a startup without outside
| money is quite impressive.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yes, it's sad but true; IBM ran eclipse into the ground over
| the last ten years and they gradually lost the mindshare they
| had 15-20 years ago when they were best in class and Intellij
| was a new kid on the block. That's on IBM. They completely
| mismanaged this project for a decade plus. They failed to
| keep up with a changing market and instead focused on
| irrelevant stuff not related to the core use case of, you
| know, developing stuff on the JVM. I was able to get away
| with using it doing Java until about 2016. Then I joined a
| bog standard Spring Boot + gradle project and it just
| couldn't do anything with it. I had no choice but to switch
| to Intellij.
|
| Eclipse is still there but I can't use it for the vast
| majority of projects I work on these days. Kotlin support is
| a joke. Gradle support never worked properly for me (though
| in fairness, I stopped trying 3 years ago).
|
| But Eclipse was a great IDE once upon a time. I still miss
| incremental compilation that actually works consistently and
| is actually incremental & fast. That's a trick that Intellij
| never even came close to doing. Intellij fakes it with
| inconsistent & super flaky caching (hence the top level menu
| item with the name: "invalidate caches"). And then they still
| manage being about 2 orders of magnitudes slower (about 100x:
| 10s vs 50-100ms). Anything over a second would be an order of
| magnitude already because the Eclipse incremental java
| compiler really is that fast. I've never seen intellij launch
| a test faster than 5 seconds; even for a 1 line change in a
| class that is not depended on by anything (i.e. the work is:
| compile 1 class), like a test. Incremental in Eclipse used to
| mean: it's compiled & ready to run by the time your finger
| reaches the next key on the keyboard: you can't type faster
| than it compiles incrementally and the test runs in process
| so there is no jvm startup overhead. Error markers would
| update in real time and be typically gone within a second or
| so of fixing the problem.
|
| Even today, Intellij never gets even remotely close to that.
| But it works and does the job and Eclipse just stopped even
| being able to make sense of the projects I threw at it a few
| years ago which makes the whole performance argument
| irrelevant. My biggest gripe with Intellij is actually just
| the endless amount of time I seem to wait for it to index,
| rebuild, and stop lying about the compilation state of my
| projects. I just can't trust it either way. It says it's fine
| and it's not or the other way around. Either way, I always
| have to double and triple check it more or less continuously
| and it is sucking up non trivial amounts of my day.
| ausjke wrote:
| One of the best products from Russia these days, another one is
| Telegram.
|
| I have an annual license for all its products, I actually use vim
| daily, but still keep Jetbrains, just in case.
| cooervo wrote:
| Since their HQ is in Russia is no one else concerned that their
| IDE may be subject to Russian spying?
|
| I mean, I'm currently reading the book Sandworm. And it is known
| in the cybersecurity world that Russia coerces or intimidates
| companies and devs to work for them as spies.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| It says on jetbrains.com that their HQ is in Prague, Czech
| Republic. On wikipedia it says they're a Czech company with
| headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic.
|
| edit: Looks like they're maybe not entirely transparent about
| that.
| artspb wrote:
| You can find all locations at the website [1], there are
| Russian cities among them. I believe it's pretty much
| transparent.
|
| [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/company/
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I mean transparent about what is really their HQ.
| artspb wrote:
| What do you mean by "really?" HQ is and always was in
| Prague, that's it.
| https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/#headquarters-
| int...
| NonEUCitizen wrote:
| Somehow McCarthyism is acceptable in woke America.
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| Which is, undoubtedly, so much worse than the spying by US
| companies?
| AndyPa32 wrote:
| Their headquarter is in Prague, Czechia and that's part of the
| European Union.
| chris_st wrote:
| I'll pile on -- thank you, JetBrains, for great tools that have
| helped my productivity immensely! I use RubyMine and GoLand
| constantly.
| rayshan wrote:
| Doesn't surprise me. I switched from TextMate to WebStorm 10
| years ago. It was like I suddenly had a superpower. I don't code
| as much nowadays but I still live in DataGrip to do product
| analytics. I talked to the JetBrains team recently about how I
| used their to build open source software, and how we use their
| tools to build America's newest stock exchange at LTSE.
|
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2020/12/interview-with-r...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| PyCharm is a no-nonsense, straightforward IDE, that's a pleasure
| to use. They somehow manage to avoid annoying feature bloat and
| crapware. No nagging, no bullshit, they are actually creating
| features that improve workflows instead of features to tick boxes
| on corporate purchasing department meeting room flipcharts or
| buzzword bingo. Remarkable and I really hope they don't get
| bought-and-killed by one of the giants. Or VCs wanting to "make
| it more $marketing_buzzword".
|
| I've used NetBeans, Eclipse, Visual Studio, QtCreator etc. over
| the years and always used to pull my hair out over the mess.
| JetBrains IDEs are way ahead in UX, usability and working day-to-
| day, minute-to-minute. Nothing flashy, nothing overly marketed,
| just rock solid and great value.
|
| Free educational license, no-brainer update management with the
| JetBrains toolbox, everything fits, doesn't demand attention to
| itself and lets you concentrate on the work.
| ajdegol wrote:
| I'm a big fan and user of PyCharm for many years, but we all
| know that when my fan starts going and the laptop wants to take
| off, we can guarantee that PyCharm is indexing ;)
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Sure there are some places to improve.
|
| My only complaint is with the remote features, now with
| covid. I want to seamlessly work as if I was sitting in the
| office (I can ssh to the machine).
|
| My current setup is to sshfs mount my remote code, install a
| conda env on my laptop mirroring the office one, and execute
| things in a terminal window. PyCharm then becomes an editor,
| autocompleter, refactoring tool, code navigation tool etc,
| but I don't do debugging within it.
|
| There is some SSH and remote interpreter options but it's
| limited and hard to use. You can't directly work on the
| remote files, it uses a model of publishing your changes to
| the remote and keeps multiple copies etc. Several of us spent
| quite some time trying to come up with a good workflows for
| this but some rather use remote desktops or X forwarding
| because it's not straightforward.
| mleo wrote:
| My workflow now involves running syncthing to synchronize
| repos between local and remote server and then run
| instances of IntelliJ locally and over VNC. I get the speed
| of local editing and running unit tests, but can switch
| over to VNC remote instance to run and debug. VNC has been
| much more performant and easier to use than X forwarding or
| remote debugging.
| novok wrote:
| There is stuff like projector that lets you make a remote
| machine a dev machine that does all the building, indexing,
| etc. Have a beefy 80 core machine be your dev machine while
| you work on your lightweight laptop, or have it live in the
| data center so debugging connections are not so 'remote',
| etc.
|
| https://github.com/JetBrains/projector-docker
| buzer wrote:
| They seem to releasing Code With Me soon (it's currently in
| EAP, I understood it should come with 2020.3). I haven't
| tried it yet, but it seems like it could be used a bit like
| VS Code's remote development mode. It does have some
| restrictions, but hopefully those will end up being fixed
| (e.g. currently you need to accept the sessions via GUI
| instead of being able to let it do automatically via SSH &
| some tool windows don't work thru it (like Maven)).
|
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/14896-code-with-me
| nanton96 wrote:
| In my team we have actually managed to have it working like
| I am in the office, but with a VPN.
|
| With the remote interpreter, we use Docker, I can debug
| code that is running on our servers.
|
| And if you set up deployment any changes on your files are
| automatically uploaded to the remote files, without
| multiple copies it just overwrites them.
|
| Its a pleasure to work with, I can debug GPU-cuda issues on
| my macbook with PyCharm GUI!! It was a little bit
| convoluted to set up, we followed this guide:
| https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-33489
| vonmoltke wrote:
| PyCharm is fine for me. IntelliJ, on the other hand, will
| periodically freeze my work Macbook when trying to reindex
| parts of our monorepo[1]. Makes me wish I wasn't forced to
| use a laptop... or a monorepo.
|
| [1] Note, just a handful of top-level targets comprising
| 2%-3% of the whole repo. Indexing the entire monorepo at once
| is a non-starter.
| lima wrote:
| This sounds very debuggable - PyCharm is basically the same
| product as IntelliJ + Python plugin. There's no difference
| in how it handles project indexing, so it's probably a
| specific IntelliJ plugin or functionality causing the
| freezes.
|
| There's a built-in CPU profiler, but given that you're a
| paying customer, just contact their support and they'll
| help you figure it out.
| bleair wrote:
| The freezes might be caused by IntelliJ's jvm running out
| of memory. Go to the help menu and then Memory Settings
| (it's not in the normal settings)
| EGreg wrote:
| That's their one thing...
|
| Indexing is required by so much of their software, even
| listening for XDebug connections with PHPStorm is not
| available while indexing. Can't they let us set the indexing
| on a lower priority and let stuff work without the index too?
| (Even if we can't jump to a specific function, XDebug
| protocol already has the file and line indicated.)
|
| Otherwise I love their software!
| kortex wrote:
| I've used Jetbrains products for five years. Updates are
| consistently an improvement. Even performance improvements from
| time to time, which is fantastic since it is a heavy java
| application. They were quick on the take with Docker
| integration, latest Cmake updates, even some Go2 generics
| support already.
| ink404 wrote:
| fantastic application for education as well. The debugger has
| been a very full featured and useful tool for teaching.
| codeduck wrote:
| Shoutout for RubyMine, Goland and Pycharm - all excellent and
| reliable.
| mekster wrote:
| If you're going to use more than 3 of their offerings, it
| starts to get cheaper going with the all products pack or
| IntelliJ ultimate is cheaper than going with 2 tools. But you
| should note that IntelliJ doesn't include every other
| products as plugins such as AppCode.
| neolefty wrote:
| Same with WebStorm editing JavaScript & TypeScript!
|
| I'm so impressed that JetBrains can put a reliable pseudo-type
| system on top of dynamic languages like Python and JavaScript.
|
| My co-workers wonder why I don't just use VSCode like everybody
| else. I mean it's not _bad_, but it's not JetBrains. You will
| have to pry my all-tools JetBrains license out of my cold dead
| hands.
| nojs wrote:
| What a great story. Profitable company, great product, simple and
| honest business model and no VC funding.
| pdpi wrote:
| It's also pretty consumer-friendly. Every year I get an email
| from them around November reminding me my subscription will
| renew in February, and then a couple more reminders along the
| way.
| random5634 wrote:
| Agreed- they also did discounts for long term users. I can't
| beer bothered too switch so pay happily because it's always
| seemed like fair treatment
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the total discount on the 'all products' pack is
| now 40% after two years of usage, so I'm paying 15/month
| for literally all my IDE's
|
| Pretty good deal if you ask me. Now if only I could do
| remote development like in VSCode.
| dlsniper wrote:
| > Now if only I could do remote development like in
| VSCode.
|
| We are working on it, stay tuned :)
| melenaboija wrote:
| Game changer for me and has been one of the reasons to
| switch to VS. I would love to see it in Jetbrains
| products :)
| usrusr wrote:
| The "subscription but keep forever on cancel, sans updates"
| licence model is just so much more honest than pretending
| that purchases would be one-time investments and so much less
| of a risk for the buyer than a hard-stop subscription.
|
| I think it's also good for the product, the right balance
| between the failure modes of being able to milk existing
| subscribers even without maintenance for the hard
| subscription and change for the sake of change that you see
| with classic one-time licencing where reasons for paid
| updates have to be invented even when there is nothing to
| improve (edit: how many great products have been ruined by
| this?).
| content_sesh wrote:
| The perpetual license fallback saved me when my license
| expired. Due to the US holidays it took our purchasing
| department a week or two to renew my license. In the mean
| time I was able to fall back to an older version, and
| upgrade once my new license came through. It was very easy
| and straightforward to do in both directions.
|
| So I agree, it's a very honest business model.
| CSDude wrote:
| Love them. I would pay for them myself, if I had to even though
| pricing would translate to a considerable amount in my country,
| its worth it. Hope their new venture, Spaces, take off.
| manojlds wrote:
| Ok so everyone knows and loves JetBrains.
|
| What's their _worst_ product so far?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Datagrip.
|
| I honestly still cannot understand why their database product
| does _not_ show the encoding /collation for fields in mysql
| (and has no way to do it either).
| jordanab wrote:
| I disagree. I use it daily as my tool to manage data in
| MySQL, Postgress, Sql server and Db2 databases, and it's
| probably one of my favorite JetBrains tools. As a Linux user
| there aren't that many good options available, and I am very
| grateful that they added this product to their line.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Why/when use datagrip instead of just the database view
| from intellij idea?
| vanpythonista wrote:
| The Database plugin from IntelliJ and Datagrip is
| essentially the same. My guess is people like to have
| separate tools based on their purpose and Datagrip serves
| that need.
| mekster wrote:
| For a standalone app, DataGrip is just too bloated and
| slow.
|
| Native apps like TablePlus is so much faster to work with.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Upsource (the code review/analytics thingy) probably?
| izacus wrote:
| YouTrack... I've never used a more confusing and feature
| lacking bug tracking system. And I've used both JIRA and
| BugZilla in professional capacity :)
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Interesting, what are some of the best features/designs from
| those systems that you find lacking in github/gitlab?
| mekster wrote:
| Agreed. Never felt that their own bug tracker is impressive
| compared to other online services. It's just messy and not
| easy on the eyes. Maybe a different team is working on it?
| abiro wrote:
| I tend to run into performance regressions maybe once year
| after upgrading one of their non-Intellij products. I suppose
| this is because they mostly use Intellij internally so less dog
| fooding for other products.
| PZ81JUXJE7uJ wrote:
| YouTrack is pretty slow.
| simoneau wrote:
| Still better than Jira!
| throw14082020 wrote:
| AppCode
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I'd say Android Studio and the whole gradle mess
| mekster wrote:
| Compared to the previous Eclipse environment, it's ton so
| much better...
| thu2111 wrote:
| Gradle isn't their product though. They just have to interop
| with it.
| insertnickname wrote:
| Android Studio is a Google product built on top of IntelliJ.
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| Agreed, but I think that's not entirely on them, but rather
| the wider JVM & mobile dev ecosystems.
|
| Still better than XCode which regularly looses syntax
| highlighting for no reason in 2020.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Gradle with kotlin script is elegant and order of magnitude
| more powerful than npm & ci
| jansan wrote:
| I always disliked the name IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains. It has a
| product name, a comany name, and something else that until
| today (15 years after I used it for the first time) is still
| unclear to me. I mean wouldn't IntelliJ not have been enough?
| Or IntelliJ IDEA by IntelliJ? It is a fantastic product, but
| the name?
| [deleted]
| topka wrote:
| Interesting. Most people I know actually call the product
| either just IDEA or IntelliJ. :)
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| TeamCity, known as TeamShitty in my previous company.
| dhd415 wrote:
| Saying that TeamCity is their worst product sounds like a
| back-handed compliment to me. It's certainly not a perfect
| product, but I've been in multiple jobs where they migrated
| the CI system (including one that did ~25k builds/day) to
| TeamCity and it was a significant improvement in scalability
| and manageability over Jenkins, Travis, and some other
| Windows-only CI system.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| To be fair _anything_ is a significant improvement over
| manageability of Jenkins.
| spyke112 wrote:
| Oh how I have wasted days configuring build and deployment
| pipelines in TeamCity. Brings back some arguably bad
| memories!
| hadrien01 wrote:
| I haven't been convinced by WebStorm (for Angular and
| Gatsby/React projects EDIT: with TypeScript). It doesn't feel
| as magical as IntelliJ or Rider/R#.
| jansan wrote:
| I cannot be as magical due to Javascript's dynamic typing. In
| Java/Kotlin, the IDE can know all about your classes, types,
| etc., but with Javascript is has to make some guesses.
|
| I am using Webstorm for my side project and have to use
| Visual Studio Code for company work. Webstorm is so much
| better IMO. Everything feels to well integrated, while Visual
| Studio Code always feels like a toy to me.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| I've used it with TypeScript exclusively. My qualms are
| more about debugging (VS Code creates a temporary Firefox
| profile in seconds and that's it; in WebStorm you need to
| configure Firefox to launch a certain way and then setup
| the debugger), the absence of refactoring options,
| framework support, etc.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Try using Typescript? It feels like magic to me anyway :)
| abiro wrote:
| Maybe not as great as Intellij, but definitely much better
| than VSCode
| thrower123 wrote:
| I'm always impressed by how strong the WebStorm intellisense
| is on pure javascript projects. Somehow it mostly gets jump-
| to-definition right, even in AngularJS tarpits that are full
| of ngInject magic.
| helge9210 wrote:
| >The Prague-based startup
|
| This is Czech company as much as Luxsoft is Swiss or Telegram is
| from UAE.
|
| Using JetBrains tools you potentially give Russia/FSB access to
| your source code and open yourself to a possibility of getting
| backdoor inserted into binaries during compilation.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is even more doubtful than with Kaspersky. But then again,
| Russia has the same concerns about Microsoft software, and so
| on down the line.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux
| maverwa wrote:
| That's the first time I am reading these allegations. Do you
| have sources backing up your claim or is it just expected to be
| "common knowledge"?
| helge9210 wrote:
| In Russia anyone rich enough is either part of FSB or gets an
| offer one can't refuse (for example, see Sysoev/NGINX).
|
| Owners of the company are not dead.
| mekster wrote:
| What happened with the nginx owner?
| helge9210 wrote:
| Igor Sysoev (not owner, that would be F5 Networks, but
| CTO of NGINX, Inc.) was detained, accepted the deal and
| was released.
| MildestMind wrote:
| Right and that's reason why all these companies not based in
| Russia.
| helge9210 wrote:
| The sanctions for (Crimea, MH17, chemical weapons attack in
| Britain ans so on) are the reason these companies are not
| based in Russia.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Do you have any evidence to back these allegations?
| mekster wrote:
| Has anybody tried to make Vim act as close as a JetBrains IDE?
|
| Some people code in Vim and think they're ace but that's just so
| far behind no matter how you tweak it.
| bytesandbots wrote:
| Vim is a way of editing. I use IdeaVim inside jetbrains IDEs
| and it is awesome. Many popular vim plugins are also supported.
|
| I still try to keep vim as close as possible as an open source
| alternative. Thankfully, a lot of editor features have been
| abstracted enough that the same software runs in vscode and
| terminal vim. e.g. ternjs for intelligent autocomplete in
| JavaScript, and the vim keybindings itself. Still, open source
| code intelligence isn't as good as the proprietary intelligence
| of jetbrains, so I bring vim inside jetbrains.
| victor106 wrote:
| It's rare these to read stories of software billionaires and
| think it's well deserved. This is one of those rare cases.
|
| Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets
| on HN, it's an example of how "what technology you pick is less
| important than your focus on user experience". It's amazing that
| their products are so performant on Java
| flohofwoe wrote:
| TBF, Jetbrains IDEs _do_ feel sluggish at least on macOS
| compared to the alternatives (like Xcode or VSCode) on my
| mid-2014 13 " MBP. I don't know if the JVM has performance
| problems specific to macOS which would explain why big UI
| applications feel so laggy, or whether other systems with more
| recent CPUs simply have more reserves to hide the lower UI
| performance though (the latter is probably more likely).
| thu2111 wrote:
| Almost always when a JB IDE is being reported as sluggish the
| problem is you're running out of heap space. Go to Help |
| Change Memory Settings and give it some more, see if that
| helps.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I have a MBP of about the same vintage, but I retired it from
| hard tasks a couple years ago. It is a 6 year old machine, we
| can't expect it to perform well.
| chokma wrote:
| Performance got worse on Linux, too. A year ago, JavaDoc
| would be displayed instantly. Now I have to wait 5-8 seconds
| for the IDE to display information about a class / method. It
| may be a kernel related bug from what I have found on the
| net, but it seems strange that some operations are still
| fast, while others take several seconds (like opening a
| menu).
| justsomeuser wrote:
| JetBrains IDEs always takes ages to start and index my code
| (especially compared to Sublime), but the jump to def, symbol
| and other search features are fast after the initial index.
| gregkerzhner wrote:
| As a counterpoint, for a project of decently large size on my
| 2019 MBP, IntelliJ is snappy and a delight to work with,
| while Xcode takes up 30 GB of space, takes minutes to boot
| up, and gives me syntax highlighting and autocompletion about
| as reliably as a broken clock tells time.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Xcode opens in seconds for me, and my projects are massive.
| Sure, it can be slow to do certain things, but its startup
| time is generally ahead of every Java-based IDE I have
| every used.
| avl999 wrote:
| Folks who still think that Java is a bad language either from
| the perspective of developer ergonomics or performance probably
| haven't programmed in it since the Java 4 days and still think
| of the language as the language of Enterprise Java Beans, Java
| Applets and hundreds of lines of XML. It is not that language
| anymore. Modern Java is blisteringly fast(and has been for a
| while) and almost the same level as C# in terms of developers
| ergonomics
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Admittedly, Java suffers from the same issue as C#; those
| ergonomics come from a bad case of kitchen-sink-itis. In your
| own code it's fine, but it's a hassle going through 8
| different paradigms in one legacy codebase.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I haven't programmed in Java since around 6 - when Spring was
| just about to cement its dominance. The ergonomics then were
| bad too. It seems lots of quality-of-life features borrowed
| from other languages went into subsequent versions
| globular-toast wrote:
| Back in the 90s Java was slower and used a load more memory.
| But the competition was C/C++ apps with native GUIs. Nowadays
| with the likes of Electron as competition Java apps are fast
| with low memory usage.
| Jakobeha wrote:
| I used to share the "Java is bad" mindset, but now I realize
| Java (at least the JVM) is actually really good.
|
| The main issues people assume with Java are that it has slow
| runtime and it's verbose.
|
| But the JVM is actually rather fast. Especially compared to
| JavaScript and Python, which aren't even compiled (and which I
| still agree with the "it's crap" hivemind). Anything that needs
| real performance you should be outsourcing to C/C++ FFI calls,
| and as long as you do that your Java app's performance should
| be OK. And a key cause of Java's big slowdown are checks e.g.
| for null-pointers and casts, which are _much_ better than C++
| /Rust's approach of being unsafe-by-default.
|
| Java is verbose, but JetBrain's awesome IDE single-handedly
| fixes this problem - writing POJOs and using long-named
| functions and classes is fast, and IntelliJ will hide excess
| boilerplate so that even reading code is easier. And if
| verbosity is still too much of an issue, there are JVM
| alternatives like Kotlin.
| drKarl wrote:
| That is actually a misconception. You may have this mental
| classification of Java as a slow language if you looked at its
| performance 20 years ago. Now it's actually really fast, it
| goes neck to neck with C++. Sure, Rust or Go or C (or
| definitely assembler) might be faster in some workloads, but
| Java is definitely very very fast nowadays. It uses a lot of
| memory because of the way Garbage Collection works, but it is
| fast. It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many
| other kids on the block...
| [deleted]
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Now it's actually really fast, it goes neck to neck with
| C++.
|
| yet every time I try a Jetbrains IDE every action seems to
| take 10x the time to be processed than it takes in QtCreator
| xamolxix wrote:
| > it goes neck to neck with C++. Sure, Rust or Go or C
|
| I hate to be that guy but 1) java does not go neck to neck
| with c++ unless you mean it can be in the same order of
| magnitude and 2) C++ is not slower than C or Go or Rust
|
| Note: by c++ I mean c++ compiled by a decent compiler e.g.
| gcc/clang/msvc
| sweeneyrod wrote:
| Yes, out of Rust, C, C++ and Go, the slow one is going to
| be the one with a GC.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| > It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many
| other kids on the block...
|
| I don't know why, but I got a good laugh from that statement.
| Those "kids" are all the same age or older than Java; PHP,
| Ruby, and Java were introduced within a few months of each
| other in 95 and Python dates back to 91.
| drKarl wrote:
| I know, I didn't say "kids" implying these languages were
| new, it was just a manner of speaking.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Yeah, I assumed as much. I doubt anyone is calling those
| languages "kids" at this point, even with PHP's
| reputation. I just found it funny to word it like that.
| devmor wrote:
| >It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many other
| kids on the block...
|
| I would seriously contest the speed of Java compared to
| modern PHP. The JIT puts PHP at near-C performance levels
| with competently written code. Which shouldn't be surprising
| if you realize PHP is largely a "wrapper" around C.
| victor106 wrote:
| https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r19&hw
| =...
|
| Vertx framework which is based on Java is at 8th position
| and PHP is 18th.
|
| But the larger point is performance is only one aspect
| while considering which programming lang. or framework to
| use
| RobAley wrote:
| I think you've proved your second point by getting your
| first wrong. The benchmarks posted are for a stack
| _including_ PHP, not PHP itself (and not the fastest
| stack with e.g. pgsql). Also, I don 't think thosd
| benchmarks use php 8, which is the first version with the
| jit that the post above referred to.
| victor106 wrote:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/onilab.com/blog/php-7-vs-
| php-8/...
|
| From the page above The bottomline: PHP 8 is still slower
| than PHP 7.
|
| This is a realistic comparison of running Magento on php7
| vs php8.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Java is fast enough for most things, but try working with an
| array of a million objects in C++ vs Java and you will see
| the difference.
|
| In Java you will have to deal with an array with a million
| pointers to a million objects and in C++ you will deal with a
| sequential segment of memory that is a million times the size
| of your object - and mostly in your CPUs cache. That alone
| will be much, much faster.
|
| But you can't do that in Java at all.
| hucker wrote:
| You typically wouldn't use an array with a million objects
| in Java if you cared about performance though (for exactly
| that reason), you'd architect it some other way. Using SoA
| style when appropriate, for example.
| gruez wrote:
| >It's amazing that their products are so performant on Java
|
| It's a total memory hog though.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| And for those who weren't happy with Java, JetBrains also gave
| us Kotlin, which fixes many of Java's problems without
| overshooting into the FP space.
| dkarp wrote:
| Absolutely agree. The amount of value that Jetbrains software
| provides far exceeds its price. Their existence is a net
| benefit to the whole software development field.
| habosa wrote:
| Congratulations to them and to all Jetbrains employees. They
| managed to do two really hard things which most developers flirt
| with at some time or another.
|
| 1. Create a new editor/IDE that's actually _better_ not just
| different. I think everyone has had shower thoughts about making
| a better IDE and many have tried and failed. Jetbrains succeeded.
|
| 2. Creating a useful abstraction. IntelliJ was a great Java IDE
| but what's truly impressive is how they've been able to repeat
| the formula for almost any language out there. Everything from Go
| to JavaScript has a great Jetbrains IDE. They seem to have
| somewhat solved the general problem, which is normally a folly
| but in this case the key to a multibillion dollar company.
|
| So again, congratulations!
| mekster wrote:
| Before JetBrains, I considered IDE to be a bloated, slow and hard
| to use tool and preferred a more lightweight text editors.
|
| JetBrains has changed that idea and shows what an IDE is supposed
| to be. Featureful but they're actually helpful form the
| developer's point of view.
| xwdv wrote:
| I don't get it though, why not just go public now and get tons of
| money? The IPO may never fetch as high of a price as it would
| now, even if the company gets more valuable in the future.
| emteycz wrote:
| It's not easy for a Czech company to do IPO in the USA. It's
| not worth it here.
| saberdancer wrote:
| They could find an investor willing to buy them out. Doesn't
| have to be an IPO.
|
| Still, if you are happy with the amount of money you have and
| you have a business you enjoy running, why sell? This is
| probably their view of it.
| ciceryadam wrote:
| Yep, buyouts happen here more often than IPOs, just
| recently Socialbakers got acquired by Astute, and
| Integromat got acquired Celonis.
|
| Also this is where Sun acquired NetBeans way back in 99.
| llcoolv wrote:
| Avast did their IPO in London. Most companies I have heard
| of were considering doing it in Singapore.
| adambyrtek wrote:
| Why does it have to be in the USA? You can IPO at other stock
| exchanges. For example, CD Projekt Red, the game studio that
| developed the Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077, is listed on
| the Warsaw Stock Exchange (Poland) and valued at ~$10bln
| (although the stock price has been really volatile recently).
| uberswe wrote:
| Sometimes it's not all about money. Having shareholders can
| make the company head in a direction different to the direction
| that the current founders want it to go.
| andylynch wrote:
| I don't see why they need to. They are incredibly successful
| already plus pretty sure enjoying what they do. An IPO would
| probably put much of that at risk so why bother? I've always
| understood them to be driven more by the desire to help make
| software development more pleasant.
| pdpi wrote:
| Because an IPO would have the founders lose a lot of control
| over the company, and they're more motivated by that than by
| money.
| ce4 wrote:
| Well, there's values that differ by countries. I've seen a few
| old family run businesses being sold off to US VCs and things
| didnt turn out well often:
|
| - customers got screwed over
|
| - same with employees
|
| - quality "optimizations"
|
| - financial engineering
|
| - founder's longterm values abondoned for quarterly gains
|
| Not taking VC cash is a more traditional take on things
| elsewhere.
| ce4 wrote:
| Stuff like this:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remi.
| ..
| sidlls wrote:
| Not taking VC cash is a more traditional take on things here
| in the US, too. The VC cash/investment money chase is really
| only a thing in tech circles, and a few other niche areas.
| The vast majority of businesses simply build "organically"
| (and most die doing it).
| domano wrote:
| Why would they? It seems that they have enough resources for
| the things they want to do, so why risk it?
| mekster wrote:
| If they lose control and starts putting profit up front as
| their primary objective than developer spirits, I'm sure many
| will move to vs code and vs code may speed up its development
| with more eyes and hands.
| astura wrote:
| "Obtain as much money as possible" isn't the goal of everyone
| at every time, especially when one already has all the money
| and resources they need.
|
| Not everyone believes life is a game where the goal is to die
| with the highest score, above all else. Some do, but not
| everyone.
|
| You're able to control pretty much every aspect within a
| private company with no shareholders to answer to and no public
| disclosures. You're free to use the assets of your company to
| implement your personal values.
| xwdv wrote:
| So that must mean they feel their values are worth more than
| billions of dollars? Really? Give up all that over some
| feelings about developer tools?
| hasa wrote:
| Why would anybody need tons of money? They have a working
| company, happy customers and perhaps happy enough employees
| too. And I'm sure they have salary big enough to pay the
| rent... and drive a Porsche if they want to.
| mcv wrote:
| The cool part is, they don't _need_ to. The founders are in
| control, not the VCs or other investors, so the company isn 't
| obliged to put generating money over all other concerns. And
| being billionaires, the founders are probably doing fine.
| They'd apparently prefer to keep the good thing they've got
| going than to ruin it by selling it off.
|
| There's more in life than getting even more money.
| thu2111 wrote:
| I think they aren't technically billionaires. Rather,
| JetBrains is valued at over a billion dollars. So _if_ they
| sold their entire stake, _then_ they 'd be billionaires.
|
| I'm sure they pay themselves well but I don't think they will
| be sitting on a billion dollars in either cash or shares.
| syrgian wrote:
| Long term that should net them a lot more money. Having and
| keeping a true mission will allow them to leave all
| competitors behind. Because even if competitors can seem
| strong from time to time (VS Code and Atom recently) they
| will end up dying because of de-prioritization and leadership
| without vision (Atom).
| jansan wrote:
| Did you read the headline? They are BILLIONAIRES. For some
| people that is enough money and they focus on different values.
| kgwgk wrote:
| But only in the sense of having a company that "is worth
| about $7 billion" according to some estimates. The point of
| the discussion is that they could convert that to real money
| that could be used to buy other assets (but no-one is forcing
| them to do so, so they really have the choice).
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