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Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?

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Re: Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?

#11

Post by zhte415 »

I've refused to give up my laptop, a T420 i7 8GB, from 2011. It's the keyboard. SSD upgrade and battery. When leaving my manager tried to give it as a leaving gift, but was blocked (I bought a second hand one for myself with similar upgrades for a ridiculously low price instead). As a compromise it will forever sit in her desk 'in case you come back'.

Give the employer they want and need, justified. A business or tech head (not just manager, but someone the buck really stops with) has a budget and they should spend it as justifies the business case, not conforming to an arbitary rule.

Re: Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?

#13

Post by LarryMade2 »

As a developer I don't want the latest and greatest - I gotta think of the least common denominator, Having the best may be convenient for its speed and capacity, but will lead me to not realize problems others are having running things on older hardware.

If I can get my performance boost through software decisions and better development practices I get less complaints.

Hard part is sometimes we are forced into upgrades as 3rd parties end support for one thing or another, then it dominoes into everything else (Yeah, Windows 10, talking about you.)

Re: Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?

#14

Post by gshdg »

segmondy wrote: post #10
gshdg wrote: post #3

3-year leases aren’t all that uncommon. I’ve also been at a SmallCo that would buy brand new top of the line Mac laptops for developers and number crunchers, and then cycle them down after a few years to staff whose workloads were less demanding. They averaged 6-8 years out of a computer. Asking developers to work on 6-8 year old hardware is definitely penny wise/pound foolish, tho.

Have you been to Amazon? I don't think I saw anyone with a laptop that was newer than 4 years old. Being Frugal seems to work for them and they are the top cloud company. I would say most developers don't need new hardware unless they are building games or developing CPU intensive application. Most laptops today have more resources than your microservice will have in the cloud.

So now your test suite takes 15 minutes to run instead of 15 seconds. Sure, that doesn’t matter at all.

Re: Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?

#15

Post by Spooky23 »

We do 4-year refresh cycles. Any less is a waste imo, unless that’s done intentionally as some sort of employee perk.

95% of the developers who claim to need frequent refresh (absent of failures) are full of malarkey. If you have enough resources to begin with, computers don’t improve on fast enough cycles. Exceptions are people doing GPU workloads or who have very high memory requirements.

Re: Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?

#16

Post by reilly3000 »

segmondy wrote: post #9
spectramax wrote: post #7

4 years, it’s painful.

Why? There's not much difference between 4 years old laptop anymore.

4 years of physical cruft is something. Gunk deep in the keyboard, tired fan bearings, HD wear- it all adds up to more risk of data loss. That may be a random reboot or data corruption. One or two days of lost work is generally more expensive than a new machine.
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