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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

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Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#111

Post by beachtaxidriver »

tgma wrote: post #23
avidiax wrote: post #10

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…

FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love A…

Google used to be so un-cheap they had a dedicated ergo lab room where you could try out different keyboards.

They eventually became so cheap they blanket paused refreshing developer laptops...

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#112

Post by BlandDuck »

loeg wrote: post #101
avidiax wrote: post #10

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…

I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.

Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.

For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.

XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#113

Post by Snarwin »

gruez wrote: post #84
sincerely wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of OPs posts in that thread are blatantly Chat GPT output

Because.. em-dashes? As many others have mentioned, ios/mac have auto em-dashes so it's not really a reliable indicator.

Several things:

1) Em-dashes

2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure

3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#114

Post by loeg »

adverbly wrote: post #109
loeg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.

It's the opposite. You're underestimating the scope of time lost by losing a few percent in productivity per employee across hundreds of thousands of employees. You want speed limits not speed bumps. And they should be pretty high limits...

I don't believe anyone is losing >1% productivity from these measures (at FANG employers).

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#115

Post by loeg »

corimaith wrote: post #103
loeg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.

The cost of a good office chair is comparable to a top tier gaming pc, if not higher.

Are there any FANG employers unwilling to provide good office chairs? I think even cheap employers offer these.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#116

Post by krisroadruck »

jhanschoo wrote: post #26

Important caveat that the author neglects to mention since they are discussing laptop CPUs in the same breath: The limiting factor on high-end laptops is their thermal envelope. Get the better CPU as long as it is more power efficient. Then get brands that design proper thermal solutions.

You simply cannot cram enough cooling and power into a laptop to have it equal a desktop high end desktop CPU of the same generation. There is physically not enough room. Just about the only way to even approach that would be to have liquid cooling loop ports out the back that you had to plug into an under-desk cooling loop and I don't think anyone is doing that because at that point just get a frickin desktop computer + all the other conveniences that come with it (discrete peripherals, multiple monitors, et cetera). I honestly do not understand why so many devs seem to insist on doing work on a laptop. My best guess is this is mostly the apple crowd because apple "desktops" are for the most part - just the same hardware in a larger box instead of being actually a different class of machine. A little better on the thermals, but not the drastic jump you see between laptops and desktops from AMD and Intel.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#117

Post by Aurornis »

avidiax wrote: post #10

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it.

Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.

> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,

You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.

Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.

There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#118

Post by kec »

corimaith wrote: post #103
loeg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.

The cost of a good office chair is comparable to a top tier gaming pc, if not higher.

Not for an enterprise buying (or renting) furniture in bulk it isn’t. The chair will also easily last a decade and be turned over to the next employee if this one leaves… unlike computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months even if your dev sticks around anyway.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#119

Post by likpok »

tgma wrote: post #23
avidiax wrote: post #10

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation. To be fair, I know ple…

FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love A…

The soft cap thing seems like exactly this kind of penny-foolish behavior though. I’ve seen people spend hours trying to optimize their travel to hit the cap — or dealing with flight changes, etc that come from the “expense the flight later” model.

All this at my company would be a call or chat to the travel agent (which, sure, kind of a pain, but they also paid for dedicated agents so wait time was generally good).

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#120

Post by gruez »

Snarwin wrote: post #113
gruez wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because.. em-dashes? As many others have mentioned, ios/mac have auto em-dashes so it's not really a reliable indicator.

Several things: 1) Em-dashes 2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure 3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long

>1) Em-dashes

>3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long

Proper typography and hamburger paragraphs are canceled now because of AI? So much for what I learned high school english class.

>2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure

This is a pretty weak point because it's n=1 (you can check OP's comment history and it's not repeated there), and that phrase is far more common in regular prose than some of the more egregious ones (eg. "delve").

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