The illusion of savings at the expense of productivity. Companies balk at spending $50/month on a tool that would save devs hours per week, only to burn thousands in wasted time. The worst part is that frupidity compounds. Slow laptops don't just waste time, they break flow...
Don't Be Frupid
61–70 of 134 posts
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Highest end dev laptops available. Waste of money. Give em an air.
The meta rn are thin clients with ssh
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.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#63I 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…
The thing is that the core message is that cost-cutting needs to be smart, not just reflexive
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#64There was a large company in my city that had around 30 floors of staff and a dedicated full time contractor managing the expensive coffee machines on each floor (running dishwashers, restocking beans/milk, cleaning/servicing the machines etc). Management decided to do away with this role and get rid of the coffee machines to save 1 Full time salary + change. The next week there were 40 staff queuing for coffee at ev…
Classic case of hidden costs that management didn’t factor in
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#65There was a large company in my city that had around 30 floors of staff and a dedicated full time contractor managing the expensive coffee machines on each floor (running dishwashers, restocking beans/milk, cleaning/servicing the machines etc). Management decided to do away with this role and get rid of the coffee machines to save 1 Full time salary + change. The next week there were 40 staff queuing for coffee at ev…
Also something that can be tested trivially: tell the contractor you don't need them for a week, then put the machines out of service...and observe.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#66I 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 understandable.
Conferences are often held at desirable destinations, allowing attendees to combine a business trip with a mini vacation. OTOH, I suspect that much fewer people would be willing to make some trips (that the company wants to happen) if there wasn't some personal benefit, because (I assume) most people don't particularly enjoy sitting on an air plane and living out of a suitcase.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#67> Cutting cloud costs This has so many angles to it. You can't just generalize cloud costs. You can stop using bloated JS frameworks to make up for the inflated application costs. You can switch to OVH or Hetzner or better yet, on-prem. It's like you are asking everyone to just give in to horrible tactics of AWS
I bet you think all people do is spin up a bunch of VMs on AWS or the other cloud providers.
I'll bet that's what most startups do.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#68Don’t bother reading the article, it’s obviously LLM generated slop. ctrl-f: chatgpt, ai Maybe I’m just crotchety but something about blogging your AI crud to the world really pisses me off. Feels… disrespectful, almost?
I think I have a pretty keen eye for LLM slop. I didn't see this at all in the article.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#69I 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's fair to say that individual tools should have to justify their costs in terms of productivity improvements or time savings.
Indeed, and this is why it's often advised that people should buy their first set of tools at Harbor Freight (or any other store selling cheap tools, for the not-Americans).
If those cheap tools wear out or break from use, then you go out and buy the really good ones from Snap-on or Milwaukee and the like.
Re: Don't Be Frupid
#70I 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…
I realized that the intersection of "understands computers" and "understands basic business management" is absolutely tiny.