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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

#201

Post by oblio »

varjag wrote: post #157
kec wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for an enterprise buying (or renting) furniture in bulk it isn’t. The chair will also easily last a decade and be turned over to the next employee if this one leaves… unlike computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months even if your dev sticks around anyway.

Right, the employee with unlimited spend would want to sit in a used chair.

An Aeron chair that's not been whacked with baseball bats looks pretty much the same after many, many years.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#202

Post by thfuran »

SoftTalker wrote: post #162
forgotusername6 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to do web development? I regularly go into swap running everything I need on my laptop. Ideally I'd have VScode, webpack, and jest running continuously. I'd also occasionally need playwright. That's all before I open a chrome tab.

This explains a lot about why the modern web is the way it is.

I do think a lot of software would be much better if all devs were working on hardware that was midrange five years ago and over a flaky WiFi connection.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#203

Post by margalabargala »

Aurornis wrote: post #148
humanrebar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying the mentality is offensive? Or is there a business justification I am missing? Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees wi…

It’s basic expense fraud. If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone. Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their me…

Frankly this sort of thing should be ignored, if not explicitly encouraged, by the company.

Engineers are very highly paid. Many are paid more than $100/hr if you break it down. If a salaried engineer paid the equivalent of $100/hr stays late doing anything, expenses a $25 meal, and during the time they stay late you get the equivalent of 20 minutes of work out of them- including in intangibles like team bonding via just chatting with coworkers or chatting about some bug- then the company comes out ahead.

That you present the above as considered "expense fraud" is fundamentally a penny-wise, pound-foolish way to look at running a company. Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#204

Post by benlivengood »

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…

It's straightforward to measure this; start a stopwatch every time your flow gets interrupted by waiting for compilation or your laptop is swapping to keep the IDE and browser running, and stop it once you reach flow state again.

We managed to just estimate the lost time and management (in a small startup) was happy to give the most affected developers (about 1/3) 48GB or 64GB MacBooks instead of the default 16GB.

At $100/hr minimum (assuming lost work doesn't block anyone else) it doesn't take long for the upgrades to pay off. The most affected devs were waiting an hour a day sometimes.

This applies to CI/CD pipelines too; it's almost always worth increasing worker CPU/RAM while the reduction in time is scaling anywhere close to linearly, especially because most workers are charged by the minute anyway.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#205

Post by jayd16 »

Aeolun wrote: post #152
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the p…

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

Maybe so but it's not like that's something you can really control. You can control the policy so that is what's done.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#206

Post by wmf »

dcrazy wrote: post #175
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the p…

Is it “soft fraud” when a manager at an investment bank regularly demands unreasonable productivity from their junior analysts, causing them to work late and effectively reduce their compensation rate? Only if the word “abuse” isn’t ambiguous and loaded enough for you!

Working late is official company policy in investment banking.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#207

Post by toast0 »

baq wrote: post #137
userbinator wrote: post #46

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

it's absolutely the wrong approach. software should be performance tested, but you don't want a situation when time of single iteration is dominated by duration of functional tests and build time. the faster software builds and tests, the quicker solutions get delivered. if giving your developers 64GB or RAM instead of 32GB halves test and build time, you should happily spend that money.

Assuming you build desktop software; you can build it on a beastly machine, but run it on a reasonable machine. Maybe local builds for special occasions, but it's special, you can wait.

Sure, occasionally run the software on the build machine to make sure it works on beastly machines; but let the developers experience the product on normal machines as the usual.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#208

Post by dingnuts »

dcrazy wrote: post #175
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the p…

Is it “soft fraud” when a manager at an investment bank regularly demands unreasonable productivity from their junior analysts, causing them to work late and effectively reduce their compensation rate? Only if the word “abuse” isn’t ambiguous and loaded enough for you!

Is this meant to be a gotcha question? Yes, unpaid overtime is fraud, and employers commit that kind of fraud probably just as regularly as employees doing the things up thread.

none of it is good lol

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#209

Post by brookst »

Tsiklon wrote: post #183
brookst wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference between a M4 max and a “real” desktop processor?

Generally PCI-E lanes and memory bandwidth tend to be the big difference between mobile and proper desktop workstation processors. Core count used to be a big difference but the ARM Procs in the Apple machines certainly meet the lower end workstation parts now. to exceed it you're spending big big money to get high core counts in the x86 space. Proper desktop processors have lots and lots of PCI-E Lanes. The current…

The M4 Max’s bus width is 512 bytes, not 64.

Re: It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

#210

Post by spyckie2 »

Aeolun wrote: post #152
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the p…

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

Basic statistics. You can find 10 people that will probably not abuse the system but definitely not 100.

It’s like your friend group and time choosing a place to eat. It’s not your friends, it’s the law of averages.

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