We have a word for this in Swedish, 'dumsnål'.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dumsn%C3%A5l
Don't Be Frupid
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#102I think the main problem is that measuring a lot of these things is incredibly hard. The post mentioned laptops and build time and it reminded me of a blog post[1] trying to figure out if it's worth upgrading to m3 macbooks. I encorage you to read the post yourself, but my impression is that the whole project was a huge waste of time. I suspect most attempts to measure impact will end this way. I also think a lot of…
I'm the author of that MacBook blog post. I wouldn't say it was a waste of time, in that it helped us feel very confident about the ROI for upgrading, and the results have been really meaningful for our team.
I wouldn't agree exactly with the article, in that while it's very easy to start making decisions that are genuinely ROI silly (all companies make them, my current one not excluded) there is a balance between just paying without question and adding friction that encourages good decision making.
But in our case, getting the data wasn't too much effort, and helped inform us for a subsequent batch of hardware purchases. It ended up representing about $50k of spend that we'd like to allocate well, and took me a couple of days to investigate and write-up: my day rate means that was well worth it.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business travel is not taxable for the employee.
Okay, but how is that a reward? Maybe I wrongfully assumed we were talking about a money / material reward here.
If you consider going to a conference abroad like a mini-holiday with everything paid, and maybe even some fun activity, well, it can be seen as a reward.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#104There’s some good points there. I think a lot of orgs can end up in the Frupid territory. Getting them to course correct and realize the dynamics of efficiency, moral, and velocity to time, money can be pretty challenging. It’s political sacrifice which a lot of why these changes don’t succeed imo.
But also, I spent almost 2 years developing with 8GB of RAM. Constraints can help you develop and understand the problems better. At various times frustrating for sure.
I’ve never understood why companies don’t ask what laptop you want instead of shoving one at you. You’re hired for your expertise and then almost instantly given a hammer when you work with wrenches.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#105I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
Regarding tools and hardware, "trust my judgment and buy what I ask, or you'll also make great savings on my salary" should be a compelling argument. If it isn't, there is a social problem that runs deeper than wasting money.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#106Re: Don't Be Frupid
#107I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
It is about the tools that you are using. The better the tool, the faster the job is done. I always get the best machine I can afford and never regret it. I'm working with data; I have a desktop machine with 256 GB RAM and 36 CPUs; it was expensive, but I can train huge gradient boosting tree models in a reasonable time.
Your response here is exactly what I'm talking about though. For you personally it looks like the choice obviously makes sense given what you're using it for.
But I've seen plenty of developers cry that they need 256 GB RAM and 36 CPUs to do React front-end development. My fundamental problem with this article is the author is showing they have no idea how business works, money is not infinite, and that if every department always got every top-of-the-line ask for their resources and tooling you could easily add a huge, unsustainable amount to your cost structure.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#108I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!" TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterprodu…
Regarding tools and hardware, "trust my judgment and buy what I ask, or you'll also make great savings on my salary" should be a compelling argument. If it isn't, there is a social problem that runs deeper than wasting money.
> trust my judgment and buy what I ask, or you'll also make great savings on my salary
Baloney. I've seen tons of developers claim they need top-of-the-line everything, even if after some point it has no improvement on their productivity. And why not? I don't blame them, I'd want the "256 GB RAM, 36 CPU" beast the other commenter mentioned, too, even if I didn't need it.
I'm not at all saying this has to be an adversarial conversation. But, as people who like to call ourselves software "engineers", I don't at all understand the pushback to at least offering some sort of analytical justification when asking a business to spend gobs of money.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet you as someone who has worked for startups that’s not true especially since every startup is trying to do something with “AI” these days
This is Hacker News. Everyone here has worked for startups.
I’ll leave that spurious idea alone.
But, the idea that you can just move workloads to a random VPS and get the same benefits of AWS/Azure/GCP is …naive and shows a lack of understanding of how any real company operates.
The last startup I worked for had 60 employees and we hosted microservices that aggregated public and private (to the company not PII) health care data for health care providers. They used them as backends for their internal processes and public websites and mobile apps.
We had to be scalable since any new provider could increase traffic by 10-20% and that helped when COVID came around in 2020 and traffic spiked
We had multiple MySQL databases, ElasticSearch, ETL processes using Lambda, CloudFront (CDN),S3 for storage, SQS (messaging), ECS (Docker orchestration), VMs for some workloads.
Should we have put those on some random VPS and spun up the equivalent for ourselves ?
Yes, I know how to do infrastructure outside of cloud. I started my career where half my job was managing all of this on prem - as in a raised floor in the same building - before AWS was a thing.
Everyone who throws together a website and hosts it on Hetzner shouldn’t be considered a “startup”.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business travel is not taxable for the employee.
Okay, but how is that a reward? Maybe I wrongfully assumed we were talking about a money / material reward here.
I got to spend a week in a nice hotel in an exciting foreign location with (by Swedish standards) fantastic weather for free.
Personally I also enjoyed some of the C++ talks, but I had no obligation to attend them.