If You Can Spend Money, Don't Spend Time

If you’re looking for the stingiest people on this planet, they are without question programmers. There’s an old joke that you should marry a programmer: “Earns a lot, spends little; always working overtime, dies young.”

Before I started my company, I was a first-rate cheapskate too. If the company issued me a laptop, I would never buy one myself. I used a Nokia N73 for three years — I wouldn’t have bought a new phone if I hadn’t lost it. Things only ever needed to be “good enough,” never mind whether the technology was already obsolete. To track down a registration code for some piece of software, I would cheerfully spend an hour tirelessly signing up for forums that had codes posted, accumulating points to download it — even though a legitimate license cost only a few dozen yuan.

Fortunately, this stinginess finally began to change in 2011.

In early 2011, I bought a laptop with my own money for the first time in my life — a 13” MacBook Pro, no less.

At the end of 2011, I bought my first iPhone, an iPhone 4S.

In early 2012, I officially bought myself a paid github.com account, $7 a month.

In the second half of 2012, I bought a 15” new MacBook Pro.

In 2012 I bought several licensed copies of software.

…

Through this ongoing process of buying, I gradually arrived at a principle — a programmer’s time is precious. As long as there is a product or service that can be bought at a reasonable price to make you more efficient, don’t spend time hunting for a free or cheap substitute.

I should have been doing software development on a 15” MBP long ago, instead of a PC or a 13” MBP.

I should have paid for GitHub’s service instead of setting up gitosis myself.

I should have bought the Kindle editions of good English books instead of painstakingly scouring cloud drives for pirated PDFs.

I should have bought the CSS templates I liked on wrapbootstrap instead of designing them from scratch, or endlessly googling in hopes of stumbling upon a good free one.

I should even have bought a DigitalOcean VM instead of running Vagrant on my own machine — purely to get faster apt-get speeds.

And yet, to this day many people still don’t grasp this principle. When I try to spread my theory to the people around me, quite a few respond: “You must be rich!”

In truth, this has very little to do with whether you’re rich. It’s a habit — the必经 road every programmer must travel to gradually shift their time toward higher-value work.

What counts as higher-value work? That varies from person to person. In my view, reading a book, writing an essay, attending events and meetups, even just sitting there pondering life — all of these are worth more than rummaging around the internet for some free resource.

If you could spend two hundred yuan on a two-hour tutorial video recorded by a genuine expert in some piece of software, would you buy it? Self-study is fine, of course — but you’ll spend several times as long at it, and you may never reach the level the video could take you to.

My guess is you still won’t buy it — because you’re still shackled to the notion that “content on the internet ought to be free.”

Here’s how to do the math. Suppose it takes you 10 hours of self-study with free documentation to reach the same level. That means that as long as your hourly pay exceeds 20 yuan, you should buy it. And what does an hourly wage of 20 yuan mean? It means a monthly income of roughly 3,500 yuan (20 × 8 × 21.5) — and the vast majority of programmers are worth several times that.

Or look at the expenditure from another angle: treat it as an investment in your own skills. Are you willing to invest?