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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

#391

Post by Aeolun »

SteveJS wrote: post #241
Aeolun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you think the problem there is that you hired the wrong people?

Was trying to remember a counter example on good hires and wasted money. Alex St. John Microsoft Windows 95 era, created directX annnnd also built an alien spaceship. I dimly recalled it as a friend in the games division telling me about some someone getting 5 and a 1 review scores in close succession. Facts i could find (yes i asked an llm) 5.0 review: Moderately supported. St. John himself hosted a copy of his Jan…

I’m not quite sure I see how building directx and building an alien spaceship are incompatible.

Nor how either translates to being a bad hire.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#392

Post by Aeolun »

mort96 wrote: post #259
Aeolun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you think the problem there is that you hired the wrong people?

As a company grows, it will undoubtedly hire some "wrong people" along the way.

Absolutely, but then you fire them again. Saves both salaries and expenses.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#393

Post by avidiax »

alt227 wrote: post #232
xmodem wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple switched to their own silicon, I was maintaining the build systems at a scaleup. After I saw the announcement, I immediately knew I needed to try out our workflows on the new architecture. There was just no way that we wouldn't have x86_64 as an implicit dependency all throughout our stack. I raised the issue with my manager and the corporate IT team. They acknowledged the concern but claimed they had enou…

> I raised the issue with my manager and the corporate IT team. > And of course myself and my team took the blame for not preparing ahead of time. If your initial request was not logged and then able to be retrieved by yourself in defence, then I would say something is very wrong at your company.

> able to be retrieved by yourself in defence

You are suggesting a level of due process that is wildly optimistic for most companies. If you are an IC, such blame games are entirely resolved behind closed doors by various managers and maybe PMs. Your manager may or may not ask you for supporting documentation, and may or may not be able to present it before the "retrospective" is concluded.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#394

Post by appreciatorBus »

necovek wrote: post #277
appreciatorBus wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then just set a limit of $200 per head instead of allowing a few bad apples to spend $20k all on themselves.

This was extra on top of whatever the average cost really is for employees who are not abusing the system. So, if other engineers get their equipment for $6k (beefed-up laptop, 32" or 30" 5k widescreen screen, ergonomic chair, standing desk — in theory amortized over 3-10 years, but really, on the retention period which is usually Maybe not peanuts, but the cost of administration to oversee spending and the cost to e…

You could just have an average cap and require manager approval above that.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#395

Post by tyleo »

Oh this is fun. My company recently did a garage sale on old hardware and I intend to post something similar compiling across 4 different hardwares and 4 different languages. I’m including some M series Macs in the mix though because the main motivation behind me doing this is how astonishing even their mobile performance is.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#396

Post by bpye »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #348
bullen wrote: post #293

Is it worth to keep your old CPU? I still run a 6600 (65W peak) from 2016 as my daily driver. I have replaced the SSD once (MLC lasted 5 years, hopefully forever with SLC drive from 2011?), 2x 32GB DDR4 sticks (Kingston Micron lasted 8 years, with aliexpress "samsung" sticks for $50 a pop) and Monitor (Eizo FlexScan 1932 lasted 15! years RIP with Eizo RadiForce 191M, highly recommend with f.lux/redshift for exception…

I upgraded two years ago to a Ryzen 5700 rather than a 5800 specifically for the lower TDP. I rarely max out the cores and the cooler system means the fan rarely spins up to audible levels.

Most (if not all?) BIOSes today will let you limit the TDP - on AMD it’s often called eco mode.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#397

Post by scosman »

fmajid wrote: post #74
zh3 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just went from i3770 (12 years old!) to a 9900x as I tend to wait for a doubling of single core performance before upgrading (got through a lot of PCs in the 386/486 era!). It's actually only 50% faster according to cpubenchmark [0] but is twice as fast in local usage (multithread is reported about 3 times faster). Also got a Mac Mini M4 recently and that thing feels slow in comparison to both these systems - li…

M4 is amazing hardware held up by a sub-par OS. One of the biggest bottlenecks when compiling software on a Mac is notarization, where every executable you compile causes a HTTP call to Apple. In addition to being a privacy nightmare, this causes the configure step in autoconf based packages to be excruciatingly slow.

Notarization isn’t called for the vast majority of builds on the vast majority of build systems.

Your local dev builds don’t call it or require it.

It’s only needed for release builds, where you want it notorized (required on iOS, highly recommended for MacOS). I make a Mac app and I call the notarization service once or twice a month.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#398

Post by avidiax »

tnkuehne wrote: post #300
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…

What would be a good incentivizing strategy to prevent over spending on hardware? I can think of giving a budget and the amount not spend is payed out to them (but when the salary is that high it might not make sense) or like having a internal dashboard where everybody can see every body’s spending on hardware, so people feel bad when they order to much.

Probably better to just request an unreviewed but detailed justification, and then monitor spend and police the outliers after the fact (or when requesting above an invisible threshold, e.g. any fully-specced Apple products).

The outliers will likely be two kinds:

1) People with poor judgement or just an outright fraudulent or entitled attitude. These people should be watched for performance issues and managed out as needed. And their hardware reclaimed.

2) People that genuinely make use of high end hardware, and likely have a paper trail of trying to use lower-end hardware and showing that it is inefficient.

This doesn't stop the people that overspend slightly so that they are not outliers, but those people are probably not doing substantial damage.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#399

Post by NBJack »

svantana wrote: post #319
joshka wrote: post #315

At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors). Based on this, I strongly believe that if…

No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.

Your brain tends to do better if you can stay focused on your task for consecutive, though not indefinite, periods of time. This varies from person to person, and depends on how long a build/run/test takes. But the challenge for many is that 'break' often becomes a context switch, a potential loss of momentum, and worse may open me up to a distraction rather than a productive use of my time.

For me, personally, a better break is one I define on my calendar and helps me defragment my brain for a short period of time before re-engaging.

I recommend investigating the concept of 'deep work' and drawing your own conclusions.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#400

Post by bpye »

kelnos wrote: post #312
sgarland wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory must be faulty, then, because I was mostly building it on an Athlon XP 2000+, which is definitely a few generations newer than a Pentium Pro. I’m probably thinking of various other packages, since at the time I was all-in on Gentoo. I distinctly remember trying to get distcc running to have the other computers (a Celeron 333 MHz and Pentium III 550 MHz) helping out for overnight builds. Can’t say that I mis…

Linux kernel compilation time depends heavily on what you're compiling though. You can have wildly different compilation times just by enabling or disabling some drivers or subsystems.

Yep - I have a 9950X desktop. Building the kernel as part of NixOS builds almost every possible option as a module - for ARM64 that takes something like 15 minutes.
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