Trade Money For Time

Dear new developer,

Don’t be penny wise, pound foolish. Your time is worth a lot, and it’s worthwhile to spend some money to accelerate toward your goals. I heard a client say once that their time was essentially free. I understood the sentiment, but the reality is that if you can be working on tasks that are higher value, it makes sense to spend the money.

Examples of ways to spend money that may not strike you as “worth it”.

• Buying a book or video course instead of just reading the free docs. I remember one time for a consulting gig I needed to integrate with Stripe. I found a $30 technical ebook that I could read a few pages of and do the exact integration I needed (take money from a ruby on rails web application). The alternative would have been an hour or two reading the docs and figuring out how to do the same thing.
• Buying and using tools. I use vim, but I know others who swear by IDEs like Jetbrains. Buying and learning these tools have saved them hours and hours of development and debugging time.
• Opening a support ticket with a service provider. When I run into a strange situation, if I’m paying someone money, I open a support ticket. I had a colleague that had an issue with images getting corrupted across a number of places in an application. He spent a lot of time looking at our code, but eventually the issue turned out to be caused by the service provider.
• Paying for commercial software. The alternative is to stringing together open source solutions. Now, open source is great and can often be a good value. But there are times when it just makes sense to pay for a solution. I often use the criteria “is this core to the business” or “what would happen if this paid service went away” to ward myself away from the idea that my time is free.
• Paying for consulting or training. Sometimes a day with a consultant (even if it is expensive) can save you weeks or months. You gain the benefit of their mistakes and experience.

Now not all of these will apply to you, new developer. You may have no budget to spend at your place of work. But you can still apply this heuristic to your own choices. Get that subscription to Udemy or Safari. Buy that book. Explore that tool and see if you can recommend it.

Realize that your time is precious and you can leverage it through spending some money on tools.

Sincerely,

Dan