121–130 of 164 posts
This effect is observable not only in the programming community, but in many others. Best example would be photography, where people spend much more time discussing their equipment and the newest lenses instead of going out and actually take pictures. I had to experience this for myself when searching for new hobbies. With most of them, I spent most time with the meta, e.g., which fountain pen to use for my writing o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should be able to run unit tests locally, and have it happen quickly. Added to that, I'm often travelling on the job and sometimes code on the go, massive multicore build machine may be out of my reach > As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff. That's the point, we shouldn't be concerned, and it's best achieved by giving us equipment that lets us take this stuff o…
I think the point is that as you gain experience you realise how unimportant your local terminal is. Engineers tend to grow out of it. Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
If I may be blunt, bullshit. Working on a remote server, especially one not on your local lan, is a lag filled pain in the ass.
Even if you decide to work on a local editor and upload to the cloud, your write-test cycle will be slower, and the best editors will require quite a few CPU cycles themselves to provide (their version of) intellisense, syntax highlighting, and documentation.
And this doesn't even cover ensuring that the computer is capable of handling remote conferencing - a resource drain to end all resource drains on laptops.
I'd go one step further and say that as I gained experience, I realized the value of the productivity gains from low latency and the freedom offered by working locally (I even keep local copies of documentation websites, so I never have to worry about them being down).
> Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
Internet can still go out in an office. So can power. People travel, work from home, and sometimes work from a conference. Why limit your employees for the sake of saving 1% of a software developer's salary (less, actually, when you consider amortization)?
I did some math. If the money they spent halved my build time (easily possible at the time, since we were on spinning rust and they wouldn't spring for SSDs "because everyone will want one, and then what?") then they could afford to buy me a new computer every couple of weeks, more often if you computed the $ lost from the average imputed load (of $500K/year) of an employee.
Bean counters. Feh.
Whatever happened to "hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive"? https://blog.codinghorror.com/hardware-is-cheap-programmers-...
Depending on how you consider that phrase: A) victim of it's own success. Computing hardware is cheap, 10k desks + masseuses + on site food service + all the other perks that are constantly individually compared against "well it's only % of your programmers salary" all started adding up B) phones made people remember that the user's hardware matters more than the developers build farm.
The user doesn't have to recompile their code every few minutes to do testing (or every few seconds for intellisense and other coding aids).
Developer hardware still matters. I can be productive without a masseuse. I can't be productive when it takes five minutes to run unit tests because my laptop sucks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should be able to run unit tests locally, and have it happen quickly. Added to that, I'm often travelling on the job and sometimes code on the go, massive multicore build machine may be out of my reach > As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff. That's the point, we shouldn't be concerned, and it's best achieved by giving us equipment that lets us take this stuff o…
I think the point is that as you gain experience you realise how unimportant your local terminal is. Engineers tend to grow out of it. Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> produces results Conversely, companies that don't offer good equipment are making a terrible decision. I once worked at a company with a single 14-inch monitor on every desk. In 2010. I was astonished.
Personally I don't mind working on an average machine. I don't do anything with huge computing needs, and it shows where the bottlenecks are before they get into production. (Then the disk starts paging and I change my mind about having a better machine).
"If they don't have the shiniest Apple MacBook then they can't work. Never mind that their job involves typing letters into a text file, something you could have done on CP/M back in '78" I don't want an Apple at all, but I do want a beefy machine because my job doesn't only involve typing text you see - for instance I also need to build the result of all that typing, and if it takes ages, guess what, the time I wast…
The single 4:3 monitor is rather like the famous Van Halen rider about "no brown M&Ms": it's an opportunity to red-flag the employer. Monitors are cheap, at most one or two developer-days of salary. If you can't get a monitor, what happens when you need to buy some more specific piece of equipment? A previous employer had an extremely liberal policy on letting us just buy anything that cost Previously I've had to do…
I think what you described can adequately be called something like 'hipster programming'.
I think a few of these items are a bit more than debating the unimportant. I don't personally feel like I need "the perfect" setup, however there are a few things that I think make me leaps and bounds more productive. Working on a few older platforms that you have to build locally can cause some machines to really bog down and chew up a ton of your development time - taking us back to the the old, "hardware is cheaper than programmers" concept that another commenter mentioned. There have been many productivity experts saying that in every field, having an extra monitor can give you huge efficiency gains. I find I got the most gains adding up to 3 monitors.. the 4th wasnt as much of a gain. I think this is domain dependent though. When working as the sole developer on small websites for clients as a side business, I really only ever use two monitors at most. Headphones, keyboards, and chairs I think are the most "diva" things to spend a bunch of time on. Yes, the chair has to be comfortable, the keyboard has to be accurate, and the headphones have to work for your work environment. However, like delivering software, sometimes good enough is better than perfect. Having an office diner of any form I think is a productivity play. If you are hungry, you are not at your best. If you have to figure out what you are going to go out and get you are taking more time - plan what to get, travel to get it - instead of just grabbing something quick across the office and eating it at your desk. I want to be productive. Not productive to the max, navigating through every single minuscule inefficiency, but making changes to get the most gain. Everyone has their preferences and friction points. If you are pissed off at your tools a good portion of the time, you probably aren't going to be as productive.
Can't believe he didn't mention text editors or indentation!