Companies are willing to pay big money to developers, however they issue crappy laptops as development machines. Laptops are designed for mobility, not for performance. Sure, you can use a dock and plug a keyboard and external monitor(s), but a Core i5 laptop with 16GB of ram running at 1.6GHz won't cut it as a dev machine. I would imagine that companies would want to provide the best tools for their developers so that they can be happy and productive. What is the rationale for companies to do this kind of short-sighted thing?
Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
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Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#2Money is just a complicated thing for people. I’ve had very close friends, good people, that had certain habits ingrained in them. Cheapness is a mental disorder, like addiction, or other compulsions. It’s solvable, but boy is it something to marvel at when you see it first hand. It’s like walking into a hoarder’s closet for the first time in your life.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#3Not all companies, maybe some. I've never worked for such a company, I've always been provided with decent/powerful desktops and laptops as extra (for meetings). Last two jobs I got powerful machines (Xeon/9900KF, 32/64GB RAM, SSD + HDD, 2 monitors, etc.)
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#4On the other hand, forcing developers to use underpowered hardware forces them to confront the performance of what they are creating.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#5It's absolutely nonsensical, and it drives me crazy as well. I'm about to do something I told myself I'd never do, and just buy my own machine to use instead of my work-provided laptop...
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#6I just had to explain to a bunch of project managers that developers cannot do docker-based workflows with a bunch of locally running cloud service emulators… with 8GB of RAM.
Watching those poor coders clicking around and typing was just painful. Multiple seconds to respond to any input.
Madness.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#7On the other hand, forcing developers to use underpowered hardware forces them to confront the performance of what they are creating.
That’s not necessarily true.
Most “slowness” is not caused by CPUs performance but by network latency and differences in data scale combined with inadequate indexing or poorly chosen algorithms.
A 1MB empty database on localhost will run well on anything!
What’s needed in my experience is network simulators that can add latency, and full sized databases with real data.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#8Internal politics is the usual root cause. For example hardware may come from the CFO's budget or IT may want fewer configs for their own convenience.
It doesn't make sense to save 0.2-1.0% of the fully loaded cost of a developer. Just making them happy and reducing churn by a tiny amount would more than pay for itself.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#9I think many managers really don't understand the impact that computer performance has on developers.
For instance, some developers have a 40 minute build process. You'd imagine that if you spent a week making that 40 minute build process a 10 minute build process you could get that time back in a few weeks.
The first response you might get if you bring the issue up is that we only work on tickets that have a direct benefit to the customer. If you stop for a moment to be articulate about it you can say "the customer wants to get features more quickly" and "we can cut three months off the schedule by speeding up the build process."
That's an argument that people will listen to.
Say you get paid $100,000 a year. Something that makes you 10% more productive saves $10,000 a year. $2000 of hardware pays for itself in about two months!
You can go from "talk to the hand" to getting what you want if you can explain just what a good investment better hardware is for the business.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#10Money is just a complicated thing for people. I’ve had very close friends, good people, that had certain habits ingrained in them. Cheapness is a mental disorder, like addiction, or other compulsions. It’s solvable, but boy is it something to marvel at when you see it first hand. It’s like walking into a hoarder’s closet for the first time in your life.
I had to explain to both friends and romantic partners that it’s absolutely insane to penny-pinch on certain things.
Pepper, for example. I always buy a good pepper grinder with the best quality whole peppercorns in it. The difference it makes to a dish is just incredible. This costs something like 3 cents per meal instead of 1 cent.