Ask HN: Early Founders – Do you buy new computers for all of your employees?

If you're hiring employees, hopefully that means that you either have revenue or investment $. If so, I'd say yes. In my experience, most employees are excited to be using a new machine, which boosts morale.

Seems kind of wasteful if you're not loaded with funds. If I were an employee, I wouldn't mind using my own computer. Prefer it actually.

You're opening yourself up to some fairly significant risks. If an employee is using a computer for personal stuff, chances are that it's been pwned by a hacker or botnet, or if it hasn't already been, it could easily be. If they're using that personal machine for your development, that pwned computer means that all your source code, production deployment, possibly user data, etc. is available for the taking. A hot startup is a significantly more attractive target than an individual employee.

Now, the calculus is likely a bit different when you're just a few guys noodling around with an idea than when you have actual users or worse, customers. But if I had enough money coming into my company to fund employees, one of my first priorities would be to get them corp laptops & desktops and request that they please try to limit personal usage of those machines, particularly usage outside of the corporate firewalls. After the hundred grand or so for an employee's salary, getting them nice hardware is peanuts. And if you're taking customers' credit card information or other personal identification, you have a responsibility to them not to open that information up to any hacker who can pwn a laptop.

In my opinion, after being participant in 6 startups in my career I see the lack of good computers as a bad sign of the company. Right now, I'm doing a good product with a 2009 Mac. I can code, I can design, but the timings go up as well the frustration when the machine runs slow in some processes or it hangout itself. To resume: it sucks balls.

I don't think companies need all employees under 6-core Mac Pros with 4K monitors, but having good computers also makes the job easier and pleasant.

The day I start my own company I will impose this rule for development/design team:

1. Fatest Macbook Pro Retina: mobility and power. 2. 16Gb mem or higher: so mem is the least of the problems. 3. Double monitor: work better from start, no need to watch 1 screen. 4. Mechanical keyboard: confort, speed and healty. 5. All machines under LAN, WiFi is slow imho.