any such (public) company has fallen into the ”printing money from past heroic projects by former employees” phase and is slowly dying out
Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#12Most of the time companies fail to see non-concrete costs, one of which is slowing developer time, while it's easier to cut costs on developer's machine. Not all, but many.
Same with "the meeting should be an email" type of thing, meetings are expensive but they cannot see the costs.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#13>a Core i5 laptop with 16GB of ram running at 1.6GHz
Not arguing that's enough, but it is probably better than the average customer laptop. So if you do get a much higher-end machine, it's worth making sure the app runs okay on something less capable than that.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#14A company is a bad simulation of a hyperintelligent single decision maker. The best possible decisions would happen if somehow one person could be omniscient about all the things that happen in a company, and had the mental bandwidth to decide everything.
Since that's impossible, we simulate this by a network of nodes (humans) linked using a very low bandwidth communications channel (speech and it's representations). Each node has finite capacity and can only bear in mind a certain number of considerations. There are a number of well known failure modes. For example:
One node is delegated a decision affecting matters they don't understand (HR person has to buy computers for Devs)
To render the financial situation comprehensible to central nodes, it is simplified by binning costs into budgets. For example, HR budget pays for laptops, engineering budget pays Dev salaries. Decisions are made to optimize each budget separately, so HR budget is optimised by buying cheap laptops, without reference to the fact that this makes engineering less efficient.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#15On 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.
I'd also add that a lot of the inefficiencies are a direct result of client demands. Not in the sense that they want it to be slower, but they refuse to budge on the requirements and do not want to adapt their business process. We bog down our validation code with dozens and dozens of edge case processing rules that could be bypassed if the client simply changed their own processes, but alas, no.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#16I once took a contract for a FAANG that had me on the shittiest piece of DELL Optiplex Dell had ever plexed. You could not have sold it for negative dollars. It took me easily 2x longer to do everything I needed to do. The contract paid out about $150,000, so the high-end graphics lappytop I needed that would have cost them $3,000 cost them $75,000 instead. This does not account for my lost sanity.
Fury. Rage. Tempest. The sound of my soul dying. Where's the fucking grenade?
Forgive me for being so complicit. $100/hr was a lot of money then.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#17There are a number of answers:
1) they are cheap
2) they don't like you and have given you the crap machine
3) they want you to create stuff that runs on a machine similar to the target audience of your product. So you'll build stuff that works on less speedy machines
of all of those options its mostly 1, then two, and very very unlikely 3
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#18Money 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.
Here's how I like to put it: "No one faults a mechanic for buying high-end tools and top of the line equipment. I program for a living, how is buying an expensive computer any different"?
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#19Usually you should do development on remote build machines where code is kept under VPN protection. For a lot of developers the laptop is merely a dumb terminal for console access.
Re: Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
#20cause it's cheaper