[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to de...
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Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?
Companies are willing to pay big money to developers, however they
issue crappy laptops as development machines. Laptops are designed
for mobility, not for performance. Sure, you can use a dock and
plug a keyboard and external monitor(s), but a Core i5 laptop with
16GB of ram running at 1.6GHz won't cut it as a dev machine. I
would imagine that companies would want to provide the best tools
for their developers so that they can be happy and productive. What
is the rationale for companies to do this kind of short-sighted
thing?
Author : actionherobiju
Score : 33 points
Date : 2022-01-26 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
| KaiserPro wrote:
| There are a number of answers:
|
| 1) they are cheap
|
| 2) they don't like you and have given you the crap machine
|
| 3) they want you to create stuff that runs on a machine similar
| to the target audience of your product. So you'll build stuff
| that works on less speedy machines
|
| of all of those options its mostly 1, then two, and very very
| unlikely 3
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Usually you should do development on remote build machines where
| code is kept under VPN protection. For a lot of developers the
| laptop is merely a dumb terminal for console access.
| Lapsa wrote:
| cause it's cheaper
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Internal politics is the usual root cause. For example hardware
| may come from the CFO's budget or IT may want fewer configs for
| their own convenience.
|
| It doesn't make sense to save 0.2-1.0% of the fully loaded cost
| of a developer. Just making them happy and reducing churn by a
| tiny amount would more than pay for itself.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > What is the rationale for companies to do this kind of short-
| sighted thing?
|
| Saving money is pretty much the only thing I can come up with. I
| certainly don't agree with any of it. The laptop piece might be a
| bit of DR (everyone has their work PC with them, so we don't need
| an emergency office).
|
| Everyone in our company gets Threadripper workstations these
| days. Currently we are handing out Thinkstation P620s. We don't
| play games with bullshit dev machines anymore. All of that
| frustration is reserved for our cloud vendors.
| Saphyel wrote:
| I feel you I got a massive macbook pro. I complain everyday
| because it's so slow and heavy. I only want a small linux laptop
| that runs perfectly fine docker...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think many managers really don't understand the impact that
| computer performance has on developers.
|
| For instance, some developers have a 40 minute build process.
| You'd imagine that if you spent a week making that 40 minute
| build process a 10 minute build process you could get that time
| back in a few weeks.
|
| The first response you might get if you bring the issue up is
| that we only work on tickets that have a direct benefit to the
| customer. If you stop for a moment to be articulate about it you
| can say "the customer wants to get features more quickly" and "we
| can cut three months off the schedule by speeding up the build
| process."
|
| That's an argument that people will listen to.
|
| Say you get paid $100,000 a year. Something that makes you 10%
| more productive saves $10,000 a year. $2000 of hardware pays for
| itself in about two months!
|
| You can go from "talk to the hand" to getting what you want if
| you can explain just what a good investment better hardware is
| for the business.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Let me give you a real life example: my company, very large, US-
| based with global presence, non-IT.
|
| - we buy every year about 10,000 laptops. Not one model because
| some are not available on all continents, but a small number of
| models.
|
| - we buy less than 400 laptops/year for IT people, that is 4% of
| the total
|
| - out of the IT people, over 80% are using the laptops just for
| emails, Excel and PowerPoint, so regular computers are fine.
|
| - the rest of ~100 laptops/year out of 10,000/year means just 1%
| of the total. The guys in charge of equipment purchasing are
| measured on cost savings, they could not care less about the 1%
| with special needs
|
| - out of the 100/year, the smart ones don't do heavy lifting on
| their laptops, but on servers or special use desktops (ex:
| Threadripper machines) that are very adequate for their needs.
| The less smart ones get what is called "engineering laptops" with
| more CPU cores and RAM and larger screens, but the thermal limits
| in the laptops are still there, so the problem is just partially
| solved at a high cost.
|
| In the past I worked in an engineering department where the dept
| manager took care that everyone had equipment matching their
| needs. That was a great manager and this is how this should work,
| but in modern companies mid-level managers are mostly a bunch of
| politruks and I am saying this as a long-time IT manager working
| with many external parties.
| bb88 wrote:
| Because laptops are a standard hammer for most organizations.
| Optimizing everyone into a standard laptop configuration saves
| money and time for the entire company. They don't need Xeon's to
| run excel.
|
| The CFO/CTO is looking at the macro picture. You are a subset of
| that organization. If your engineering director wants more
| powerful laptops, it should be up to him or her to work through
| the CFO/CTO to do it.
|
| Also some companies have a policy where the less the executives
| spend, the more money they get in bonuses. It's effective for
| management, but it sucks for you.
|
| Edited to add:
|
| Increased performance is a "soft" metric, in that it's hard to
| quantify. Costs are a "hard" metric, in that it's easy to
| quantify. Which do you think the CFO is going to look at when
| making a business decision?
| jeff_vader wrote:
| I do not know and by now I do not care. I switched to
| contracting/freelancing and hardware/tooling is mostly my own
| responsibility (was one of top 3 reasons why I switched). Loving
| my mildly overkill desktop machine now.
| tsywke44 wrote:
| any such (public) company has fallen into the "printing money
| from past heroic projects by former employees" phase and is
| slowly dying out
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Because the people making the decisions are not the same ones
| doing the work.
| crate_barre wrote:
| Money is just a complicated thing for people. I've had very close
| friends, good people, that had certain habits ingrained in them.
| Cheapness is a mental disorder, like addiction, or other
| compulsions. It's solvable, but boy is it something to marvel at
| when you see it first hand. It's like walking into a hoarder's
| closet for the first time in your life.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I had to explain to both friends and romantic partners that
| it's absolutely insane to penny-pinch on certain things.
|
| Pepper, for example. I always buy a good pepper grinder with
| the best quality whole peppercorns in it. The difference it
| makes to a dish is just incredible. This costs something like 3
| cents per meal instead of 1 cent.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Here's how I like to put it: "No one faults a mechanic for
| buying high-end tools and top of the line equipment. I
| program for a living, how is buying an expensive computer any
| different"?
| __d wrote:
| Oh, but they do!
|
| The cost of cheap tools can be a fraction of a well-made
| tool. On paper (ie. the only way in which a manager can
| compare them) they have identical functionality. So why
| spend 100x more?
|
| Even if you then have to replace them more often, it's not
| likely that they need to be replaced 100x more often. And
| even if they do, that's not in this year's budget, so you
| can deal with that problem later, while saving a bunch now.
|
| The intangible cost of crappy tools is very hard to measure
| in a way that can compete with the dollar cost in a
| manger's mind.
|
| And so similarly, you get two extremes of developer
| culture: Aeron chairs, standing desks, subtle lighting, and
| good machines or crappy desks, left-over chairs, 7/11-style
| lighting, and cheap laptops.
| crate_barre wrote:
| Some people find it virtuous to make do with a lesser
| _whatever_. This can happen for a number of reasons,
| usually a very painful personal experience or a type of
| severe brainwashing (your parents convince you walking a
| mile to school is virtuous, so now you do the same).
|
| If you find yourself having an eloquent long winded
| discussion with such a person, explaining to them they
| aren't saving money by foregoing the soda at a night out
| (it's cheaper to buy water after all), looking around the
| menu for the best value, half of which they can
| definitely take home (at this point I start to wonder if
| it's theater, and even if it is theater, you'd have to be
| sick to even take part in such theatrics), I don't know,
| what's there to discuss. You almost want to throw a wad
| of $500 at their face.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I like the strategy Adam Savage follows: Buy the cheap
| tool! If it breaks, throw it away and buy the expensive
| one instead.
|
| This is a self-optimising strategy where he has cheap
| tools where it doesn't matter, and expensive tools where
| it does.
|
| While this kind of approach can work very well, it
| doesn't translate well to the world of "corporate drone
| doing software development on company equipment" because:
|
| 1. Development don't have a nice clear "break" signal,
| they just introduce friction. Lots of small frictions,
| each maybe just a fraction of a second, too difficult to
| measure.
|
| 2. The entire problem is that unlike Adam working in his
| own shop, in charge of his own tools, most corporate
| developers get very little choice in their tools.
| oceanghost wrote:
| I have had the exact same argument with several partners--
| but absurd.
|
| One insisted I was "wasting money" by buying name brand
| French's mustard. At the time, the gallon jug of it was $3.29
| and lasted years-- and I made low 6 figures.
|
| Another g/f insisted I was wasting money buying bags of ice
| at the store (we didn't have a water hookup for our fridge).
| She spent $30 on ice trays, and then there was never any ice
| because it had become this manual process that needed to be
| managed several times a day. I went back to buying ice...
|
| --
|
| So tell me about these peppercorns?
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| How many pepper grinders do you need? Lol.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Most of the time companies fail to see non-concrete costs, one of
| which is slowing developer time, while it's easier to cut costs
| on developer's machine. Not all, but many.
|
| Same with "the meeting should be an email" type of thing,
| meetings are expensive but they cannot see the costs.
| tyingq wrote:
| >a Core i5 laptop with 16GB of ram running at 1.6GHz
|
| Not arguing that's enough, but it is probably better than the
| average customer laptop. So if you do get a much higher-end
| machine, it's worth making sure the app runs okay on something
| less capable than that.
| majewsky wrote:
| Exactly this. I wish more developers were being made mindful of
| the humongous amount of resources they're wasting.
| ajb wrote:
| A company is a bad simulation of a hyperintelligent single
| decision maker. The best possible decisions would happen if
| somehow one person could be omniscient about all the things that
| happen in a company, and had the mental bandwidth to decide
| everything.
|
| Since that's impossible, we simulate this by a network of nodes
| (humans) linked using a very low bandwidth communications channel
| (speech and it's representations). Each node has finite capacity
| and can only bear in mind a certain number of considerations.
| There are a number of well known failure modes. For example:
|
| One node is delegated a decision affecting matters they don't
| understand (HR person has to buy computers for Devs)
|
| To render the financial situation comprehensible to central
| nodes, it is simplified by binning costs into budgets. For
| example, HR budget pays for laptops, engineering budget pays Dev
| salaries. Decisions are made to optimize each budget separately,
| so HR budget is optimised by buying cheap laptops, without
| reference to the fact that this makes engineering less efficient.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Think depends where. I got lucky used a 16" MBP spec'd out and
| XPS 15 spec'd out.
| hkchad wrote:
| I buy all my developers new MacBook Pro's every 18 months. Partly
| b/c I am (was) a developer and also I understand time/value/money
| and there is ZERO point in wasting time because of a few $1,000
| laptop over a couple years.
| robotnikman wrote:
| My 2 cents from working in IT
|
| Where I work now, we do issue developers better laptops than the
| usual we give out, however they are all the same make and model
| with no one offs.
|
| It makes keeping track of equipment and inventory easier, and if
| ever someone needs a new one we just load up one with a pre-built
| image we made with all the programs and settings pre-installed,
| and its good to go with little hassle. My guess is other
| companies have similar reasons, except maybe they want a standard
| laptop model used by all employees who need one, regardless of
| role. Sometimes its because an IT department may have only a
| shoestring budget to work off of due to execs wanting to save
| money.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I've never worked anywhere that didn't give me my choice of the
| latest top end Apple hardware. Is this more of a corporate thing?
| chitza wrote:
| Not all companies, maybe some. I've never worked for such a
| company, I've always been provided with decent/powerful desktops
| and laptops as extra (for meetings). Last two jobs I got powerful
| machines (Xeon/9900KF, 32/64GB RAM, SSD + HDD, 2 monitors, etc.)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, in my case, I have been using laptops for development for
| at least ten years. I can easily afford a real powerhouse
| desktop, but I have deliberately chosen laptops.
|
| Most of the time, I don't need a huge amount of power. I'm not
| rebuilding the Linux core, every time I compile; usually an app.
|
| For my server work, all I really need, is an FTP connection, a
| browser, and a text editor.
|
| The reason that I prefer laptops, is that, every now and then, I
| need to take the show on the road, and it is _very_ convenient to
| just yank my main device out of the dock, and drop it into a
| backpack, without worrying about syncing. I tend to do native
| Apple work, in Swift, using Xcode, so it is important to have a
| lot of local files. I can 't really do the work remotely, on a
| cloud.
|
| When I was still in my "day job," the company issued me a laptop
| (because I was a manager, and traveled a lot). I brought a laptop
| for my own work, because that was all done in "nights and
| weekends." I often threw my personal laptop in with my work
| laptop, when I traveled.
|
| Nowadays, I have an M1Max 14-inch MacBook Pro. It is pretty much
| maxxed. Every bit as powerful as any desktop I've ever used.
| Xcode is still fairly klunky on it, because the code in Xcode is
| ... _classic_. I don 't think a Mac Pro would be any real help.
|
| But when I'm docked (which is most of the time), I'm running on
| an LG Ultrawide (49-inch, 5120 X 1440) monitor. Even the 16-inch
| can't hold a candle to that, so the 14-inch is better for me.
|
| But that's me, and my workflow. YMMV.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I very briefly had an M1 Pro laptop (unfortunately it came with
| a faulty keyboard, so now I'm waiting another month for the
| replacement to ship), and I was blown away by how fast it is.
| My daily driver is currently the 2015 MacBook Pro, and I hadn't
| realised what I was missing.
|
| Looking at benchmarks, it turns out that the M1 Pro is actually
| a full 8-9x faster than the 2015 model at multicore workloads
| (which most dev workflows will be): twice as fast single core,
| 4x more cores + 2 efficiency cores!
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| On the other hand, forcing developers to use underpowered
| hardware forces them to confront the performance of what they are
| creating.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That's not necessarily true.
|
| Most "slowness" is not caused by CPUs performance but by
| network latency and differences in data scale combined with
| inadequate indexing or poorly chosen algorithms.
|
| A 1MB empty database on localhost will run well on anything!
|
| What's needed in my experience is network simulators that can
| add latency, and full sized databases with real data.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'd also add that a lot of the inefficiencies are a _direct
| result_ of client demands. Not in the sense that they want it
| to be slower, but they refuse to budge on the requirements
| and do not want to adapt their business process. We bog down
| our validation code with dozens and dozens of edge case
| processing rules that could be bypassed if the client simply
| changed their own processes, but alas, no.
| matzhouse wrote:
| It's also kinda hard to measure how much a bit of hardware helps
| or hinders a user.
|
| I guess it's something like cost vs average needs. If most people
| can do most things without too much difficulty then you're mostly
| good?
| YEwSdObPQT wrote:
| favorited wrote:
| It's absolutely nonsensical, and it drives me crazy as well. I'm
| about to do something I told myself I'd never do, and just buy my
| own machine to use instead of my work-provided laptop...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I just had to explain to a bunch of project managers that
| developers cannot do docker-based workflows with a bunch of
| locally running cloud service emulators... with 8GB of RAM.
|
| Watching those poor coders clicking around and typing was just
| painful. Multiple seconds to respond to any input.
|
| Madness.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I've been stuck with a older, underpowered dev machine but in
| compromise I've also been given a VM in the cloud to work with.
| It has way more horse power for way less cost than any comparable
| laptop. At this point it feels like they just don't want to
| manage physical devices anymore and want the flexibility of
| renting whatever compute resources are needed for development.
|
| Edit: The actual day to day experience is not so bad with vscode
| and the right plugins.
| cupcakesupreme wrote:
| I once took a contract for a FAANG that had me on the shittiest
| piece of DELL Optiplex Dell had ever plexed. You could not have
| sold it for negative dollars. It took me easily 2x longer to do
| everything I needed to do. The contract paid out about $150,000,
| so the high-end graphics lappytop I needed that would have cost
| them $3,000 cost them $75,000 instead. This does not account for
| my lost sanity.
|
| _Fury. Rage. Tempest. The sound of my soul dying. Where 's the
| fucking grenade?_
|
| Forgive me for being so complicit. $100/hr was a lot of money
| then.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Wouldn't you normally supply your own equipment for a contract?
| cupcakesupreme wrote:
| The manager was a creepy ass creeper who wanted your machine
| _tied_ to his machine so he could observe you whenever he
| felt like it. Yes, one of those.
| bb88 wrote:
| $100/hr still is.
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