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Don't Be Frupid
111–120 of 134 posts
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 advers…
I don't necessarily "need", I want my aggregate personal equipment to cost a large fraction of, say, my manager's company provided car. The justification is personal, not analytical.
Given a fixed high budget, it doesn't take much common sense to prefer something more useful (e.g. a spare laptop instead of a luxury chair and desk, or remote servers instead of some dangerous SaaS).
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#113> Conference Austerity > Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly. I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me. Conferences are expe…
My boss and I once justified a visit to one of the Autodesk conferences (which was, in my opinion, quite lavish and expensive) by my getting time with some of their API developers. It was maybe 15 minutes, but it was worth every second.
Can you say more about why this time was valuable?
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#114I first heard the word "frupidity" from friends at Amazon, where this seems to be quite common. Examples include prohibiting buying business class tickets, even if discounted, so people buy more expensive full fare economy tickets instead and upgrade cheaply off that with points. Business travel in general seems to be rich hunting grounds for frupidity, because the bean counters aren't the ones traveling. The good ol…
Business travel also has the potential of suffering from the "different budget" problem, where a cheaper flight requires an extra night at a hotel, or the savings from a cheaper hotel are more than eaten up by the additional taxi costs (but only the more expensive constellation is within the approved limits). Business travel has a lot of potential for abuse too, though, so the restrictions can sometimes be understand…
At a previous company, when I had to travel, we had a contract with some sort of travel agency. They loved ignoring all of my instructions ("late morning departure, direct flight, out of ") and would book me on a 7:30am flight, out of an airport it would take me three hours to get to, with a connection in a totally different part of the country.
To their credit, when I would email them and let them know that I found a cheaper direct flight, leaving at my preferred time, out of my preferred airport, they would graciously change the flight to that one.
But I'm not sure why I was required to do the legwork at all for a service they were nominally providing.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#115People tend to forget that even in smaller companies 15 usd / month isn't that simple. You need to approve the vendor, check if there no minimum amount of seats, then figure out that even for a simple sso they have a different plan which is 50 usd / month And with laptops, I get the point to some extent, nobody says buy an engineer a 2 core 8gb ram machine, but try speccing up a Mac and see how deep the apple tax is…
> And with laptops, I get the point to some extent, nobody says buy an engineer a 2 core 8gb ram machine, but try speccing up a Mac and see how deep the apple tax is on ram and storage, especially if you're non US.
I know you mentioned "outside the US", but inside the US, skimping on $1500 when you're already paying the developer $150k a year, plus benefits, plus the laptop already costs $2500 as a baseline seems insane.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have switched to that for my personal machine too, and it's honestly pretty good. Still working out some kinks but overall I think it's a good idea. I am on an m3 air though, which is not necessarily a weak machine and can still hold it's own in no-network areas for light work.
my requirements is "any macbook with apple silicon (M1/2/3/4/etc) with at least 16GB of RAM (and 256GB of ssd)". I'm still rocking an M1 16GB for my personal stuff since 2022. No complaints.
The thin Air laptops with an ARM chip are so good for this stuff, how long does the battery last?
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#117Why do enterprises give developers shitty laptops? Why does it take a month to onbaord a new dev? Why does it take weeks to get a new dev tool installed that requires admin access? To get a firewall request reviewed? To get your team access to a fresh public cloud account for a new project? The answer to all these questions is that things that are measurable will always be prioritised over things that are not easily…
Most of the "security reasons" from the orgs is just laughable. Most will do a half decent job of even securing the whole infrastructure and spend majority of their time checking boxes of an outdated compliance agreement. No wonder data breaches are at it's peak. There is no real security improvement, it's just bandages
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#118I 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…
With a title like "Don't Be Frupid" it's probably best to set your expectations low.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#119We have a word for this in Swedish, 'dumsnål'. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dumsn%C3%A5l
It's like a corollary to Boots Theory.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#120Was nodding along until "...consolidating databases into a single underpowered behemoth...". Nothing worse than race conditions and stale data between multiple disparate datastores. I'd rather have one database and more ram for as long as possible, tyvm. Some of the latest nights I've had debugging were at companies with mission critical data spread across multiple databases. I know it's orthogonal to the point, but…
I guess the operative word is 'underpowered'. My low-stakes conspiracy theory though is that cloud providers (and symbiotic entities in the ecosystem) have helped turn developers against monoliths in favour of self-serve microservice architectures and devops because there's a lot more money in it for them when people are spinning up dozens of hermetically sealed, over-provisioned services, each with their own DB, cac…
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