Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

blog.fogcreek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 151 posts

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#101

Post by [deleted] »

cake wrote: post #85
wheels wrote: post #32

What I always find a little bit suspect about these posts – especially from FogCreek – is that it's really, "The Price of Dev Happiness As Long As You Define Happiness The Way Your Boss (Me) Does". I prefer sitting cross-legged with a 13" laptop on a mat on the floor. I've had most of the things mentioned in the article and prefer my mat on the floor, thank you very much. But I'm just a random example. More of what I…

I prefer sitting cross-legged with a 13" laptop on a mat on the floor. Somehow that's almost how I prefer to work too, but it's sort of impossible to have this setup in a professional environment.

[deleted]

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#102

Post by groby_b »

cake wrote: post #85
wheels wrote: post #32

What I always find a little bit suspect about these posts – especially from FogCreek – is that it's really, "The Price of Dev Happiness As Long As You Define Happiness The Way Your Boss (Me) Does". I prefer sitting cross-legged with a 13" laptop on a mat on the floor. I've had most of the things mentioned in the article and prefer my mat on the floor, thank you very much. But I'm just a random example. More of what I…

I prefer sitting cross-legged with a 13" laptop on a mat on the floor. Somehow that's almost how I prefer to work too, but it's sort of impossible to have this setup in a professional environment.

Depends on where you work :)

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#103

Post by T-hawk »

Revisor wrote: post #5
Jem wrote: post #2

I had no idea that some people like to code standing up; why is this? (Genuine curiosity, someone enlighten me please :))

There is a lot of discussions about this on Hacker News and generally people who work standing are happy about it. See eg http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828948 For more http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=sta...

Just don't confuse the correlation and causation. Those who stand do so because they like it. It doesn't automatically mean that everyone who tries standing likes it.

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#104

Post by chc »

gte910h wrote: post #94
mgkimsal wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

too hot? I wouldv'e committed a small crime for heat. I came in to my office in July 2007 and it was 62f. It warmed up to about 66 after I ran some space heaters. (this was in the US, not the southern hemisphere!) :)

You can locally heat up a cube. There isn't really an effective cooling substitute that's localized. I would have killed for 62F. My house is 68F year round (I work at home now). (My bedroom is probably 64-66 or so).

Heck, you can locally heat up a cube just by compiling and keeping Flash videos running constantly.

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#105

Post by groby_b »

seanalltogether wrote: post #71
kenjackson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't do serious dev work on a laptop. Too underpowered. Everyone here gets a laptop, but it's for working in bed, or on the road, at your child's birth, etc... But for day to day dev work, a high-end workstation is a fair bit more productive. At least for the type of dev work we do.

We do client work that encompasses everything, C++, ObjC, Java backends, Java Frontends, Flash, HTML/JS, etc. I'm not sure what serious dev work implies?

Try compiling any _large_ project on your machine. Say, Webkit. Come back and tell me how much fun that was :)

Kidding aside, if you have to dig into large-scale projects or heavy computational stuff, a laptop is underpowered. Thankfully, not everybody needs to do that.

But even for day-to-day work - how can you live with 15" of screen real estate? Without an ergo keyboard?

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#106

Post by rdl »

spolsky wrote: post #45
wheels wrote: post #32

What I always find a little bit suspect about these posts – especially from FogCreek – is that it's really, "The Price of Dev Happiness As Long As You Define Happiness The Way Your Boss (Me) Does". I prefer sitting cross-legged with a 13" laptop on a mat on the floor. I've had most of the things mentioned in the article and prefer my mat on the floor, thank you very much. But I'm just a random example. More of what I…

I love the way people on the Internet always find a way to misinterpret every post in the worst possible way, no matter how little sense they make. After reading a detailed article about how we spend over $5000 to make sure our developers are comfortable at work, do you really think that we then CHAIN them to an Aeron chair and REQUIRE that they use 30" monitors even if they prefer sitting cross-legged on the floor w…

I'm really interested in your next post about "real cost of private offices"; please do this post before I pick our offices.

I strongly prefer private offices, but it looks like the only cost effective way to get this is to rent a 10BR house for $10k/mo and have enough space for ~20-30 developers in a mix of private and semi-private (shared) offices, conference rooms, etc.

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#107

Post by mark_story »

damoncali wrote: post #74
spolsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some corrections: (1) it doesn't matter what I believe in. We now have telecommuters at both Stack Exchange and Fog Creek and for the right individual, it's fine. (2) this doesn't follow. Do you really think we give people desktop computers simply to make it impossible for them to work from home? That's silly. Anyway, the telecommuters we do have almost exclusively use desktop computers. You know why? Because once yo…

Because once you've programmed on a 30" monitor, you'll never go back to programming on a laptop. Total sidebar, but I actually have found 30" to be too big. I could not get my neck to stop hurting from trying to use the whole screen, and wound up using the innermost 23-24". So I ditched it for a 23" monitor. Was I doing something wrong? I really wanted to like the 30", but I just couldn't get it to work without putt…

I've not used a 30", but I've use 27" plenty. I just spread applications around the screen. Having an editor and terminal/browser side by side is quite handy.

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#108

Post by mattdeboard »

acangiano wrote: post #24

I expressed similar thoughts in the past: http://programmingzen.com/2010/12/28/give-your-programmers-p... It just doesn't make sense to cheap out on these things. If you do because you can't afford it for every developer, then you don't have enough money to employ that many developers.

Wait, sorry, are you saying that a company shouldn't hire a person if they can't afford top-end office equipment? Or is this only for developers? I think that's silly & unrealistic, and am hoping it's just hyperbole to make a point.

(edit: I don't actually disagree with your general point, that better tools == higher productivity == better return on that developer salary. However, implying the cost of buying top-end gear for a dev should be a sunk cost isn't fair or realistic. Especially when the business has other employees who don't touch emacs or eclipse but still sit at a desk all day working on a computer. )

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#109

Post by jseliger »

gte910h wrote: post #50
JimmyL wrote: post #49

An old company of mine had Nightingale CXOs ( http://www.nightingalechairs.com/cxo_home.html ) as the standard issue developer chair. I remember the first few days I was there, not really getting it - the thing is this complex-looking chair that you'd think would be infinitely comfortable, and mine...wasn't. And then around day three, just as I was finishing all my HR stuff and the get-to-know-you tours (and starting…

I found the aeron's nothing that complicated to adjust properly, but man, was that stuff worth it.

I'm sitting in the Herman Miller Embody, which is vastly harder to adjust properly, at least for me. I've actually been meaning to finish a very long review of the chair; maybe this'll inspire me to do so and submit to HN.

Re: The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One

#110

Post by angelbob »

mattdeboard wrote: post #108
acangiano wrote: post #24

I expressed similar thoughts in the past: http://programmingzen.com/2010/12/28/give-your-programmers-p... It just doesn't make sense to cheap out on these things. If you do because you can't afford it for every developer, then you don't have enough money to employ that many developers.

Wait, sorry, are you saying that a company shouldn't hire a person if they can't afford top-end office equipment? Or is this only for developers? I think that's silly & unrealistic, and am hoping it's just hyperbole to make a point. (edit: I don't actually disagree with your general point, that better tools == higher productivity == better return on that developer salary. However, implying the cost of buying top-end…

Probably primarily for developers. A $100/mo investment to get more out of your developers (who cost at least $30k, and usually $100k+) isn't a problem. If you're looking at much cheaper office staff, you can presumably pay less to make them more productive since hiring more of them is cheaper (measured in Aerons).
Post reply on HN