7 ms·

"If they don't have the shiniest Apple MacBook then they can't work. Never mind that their job involves typing letters into a text file, something you could hav

by V-2 10y ago

"If they don't have the shiniest Apple MacBook then they can't work. Never mind that their job involves typing letters into a text file, something you could have done on CP/M back in '78" I don't want an Apple at all, but I do want a beefy machine because my job doesn't only involve typing text you see - for instance I also need to build the result of all that typing, and if it takes ages, guess what, the time I waste waiting for it to complete is not worth whatever money they cleverly save by supplying me a "CP/M from '78" "To insult a new hire by providing only a single 4:3 monitor? I can't work like this." I can work like this, but I prefer two monitors. How much does a monitor cost anyway? Having two displays is much more convenient. I can program sitting on a kitchen chair, but I prefer an ergonomic office chair, because I spend a large part of my life at work and I see no reason why it should feel uncomfortable. Oh, how pampered I am! "- You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road. - Cardboard box? - Aye. - You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank." etc.

Nursie 10y ago
Building on your own desktop? That seems rather archaic. Well-connected and integrated access to a massive multicore build machine seems a little more modern. As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff.
- splatcollision 10y ago
  Sometimes once in a rare while you want to be able to work totally offline, or in a low-connectivity environment. For example I'm currently on a commuter train on an hour+ ride into the city, and if I want to do everything locally, I can. Options are good. (PS: ask me about working remotely!)
- koder2016 10y ago
  I guess using some of my 8 logical cores for background static analysis is archaic now?
- V-2 10y ago
  I should be able to run unit tests locally, and have it happen quickly. Added to that, I'm often travelling on the job and sometimes code on the go, massive multicore build machine may be out of my reach > As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff. That's the point, we shouldn't be concerned, and it's best achieved by giving us equipment that lets us take this stuff off our minds
  - Nursie 10y ago
    I think the point is that as you gain experience you realise how unimportant your local terminal is. Engineers tend to grow out of it. Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > as you gain experience you realise how unimportant your local terminal is. If I may be blunt, bullshit. Working on a remote server, especially one not on your local lan, is a lag filled pain in the ass. Even if you decide to work on a local editor and upload to the cloud, your write-test cycle will be slower, and the best editors will require quite a few CPU cycles themselves to provide (their version of) intellisense, syntax highlighting, and documentation. And this doesn't even cover ensuring that the computer is capable of handling remote conferencing - a resource drain to end all resource drains on laptops. I'd go one step further and say that as I gained experience, I realized the value of the productivity gains from low latency and the freedom offered by working locally (I even keep local copies of documentation websites, so I never have to worry about them being down). > Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound. Internet can still go out in an office. So can power. People travel, work from home, and sometimes work from a conference. Why limit your employees for the sake of saving 1% of a software developer's salary (less, actually, when you consider amortization)?
    - V-2 10y ago
      Well, my experience on the matter aligns with what falcolas says
    - 10y ago
- gbog 10y ago
  Building, editing, testing, all of that is better done remotely with ssh and gnu screen or similar.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    Why? Not all software is designed to run on servers. In some cases, building locally will give a quicker response cycle. Editing locally is almost always a better user experience. Especially if your servers aren't in the same building. And plenty of other reasons (travel, flexibility, ...)
  - falcolas 10y ago
    I personally disagree. That requires that you use vim or emacs, which is not feasable (or even desirable) for many programmers. It also requires a stable and low latency network connection; something which is not always available. Anecdotally, I had to work this way once for an employer. It worked rather well, but our "development" machines were on-premises, and when they went down, everybody was down. I was also extremely limited in what I could download and run, since the machine was shared with other developers. Not very productive. Though, I did get really good with Vim, so I am thankful for that.
    - gbog 10y ago
      Use vim or emacs not feasible? not desirable? If most of the greatest programmers use them, if you're a wannabe programmer how would you not use these tools? It's like willing to be a cowboy but for thanks to the horse and the gun...
      - pjc50 10y ago
        If you're writing C# you'll be much faster with intellisense and autocomplete. It's quite amazing how much help it is, especially before you reach expert level. Occasionally you encounter weird toolchains where some stuff is much more convenient to do from the IDE, so you end up editing files in emacs then having Quartus or Vivado open to look at their reports. (People should be a bit more specific about their working environment before confidently declaring the best way to do things!)
protomyth 10y ago
>> "To insult a new hire by providing only a single 4:3 monitor? I can't work like this." > I can work like this, but I prefer two monitors. How much does a monitor cost anyway? Having two displays is much more convenient. I now prefer a LG 21:9 34". They are fairly cheap, have a good quality screen for long viewing, and the extra width is a real help. I wouldn't buy the thunderbolt version as it really doesn't do the thunderbolt properly. I think any programmer or manager bitching about developers chairs or screens is a sadist and doesn't really get we have to live with this stuff and it affects our health.
- oz 10y ago
  I have an Asus 21:9 29", 2560x1080, not 3440x1440 like the LG you mention (which I've considered). The extra width is nice, and the aspect ratio is perfect when watching movies, but I find I need more vertical pixels. Instead of the 34", wouldn't make sense to just go 4K (3824x2160) and get it over with? You're getting more vertical AND horizontal pixels. Personally, I'm salivating at the Seiki SM40UNP (40"). Anything smaller at 4K resolution and you'll need display scaling, negating the size gain. I don't think my 2013 ultrabook can drive it at 60Hz, but there are apocryphal reports that I may be able to eke out 50Hz.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Well, when I bought it before the 4K was available, but LG is supposed to have a 4K equivalent coming in 21:9 which would have the same vertical of 2,160 pixels (giving 5,040 x 2,160). I'll get that when it comes out because I like ultra-wide versus buying 2 monitors.
  - iwintermute 10y ago
    >> Anything smaller at 4K resolution I have 32" 16:9 Benq at 4K and it's perfectly usable without scaling. You can think about it this way: 32" is double 16" monitors, and 15,6" monitors (rather popular in notebooks) with 1080p are quite usable. And it took me few days to adapt from previous 27" 1080 monitor.
pjc50 10y ago
The single 4:3 monitor is rather like the famous Van Halen rider about "no brown M&Ms": it's an opportunity to red-flag the employer. Monitors are cheap, at most one or two developer-days of salary. If you can't get a monitor, what happens when you need to buy some more specific piece of equipment? A previous employer had an extremely liberal policy on letting us just buy anything that cost <£100. Obviously we recognised this was a privilege that would be taken away if abused, so we didn't use it much, but it was tremendously liberating. Want an evaluation board? Need a cable? Or a book? Done! Previously I've had to do a PO for a box of M5 bolts. That's the morale-draining opposite, especially if you have to sit around wasting several orders of magnitude more than the cost for the paperwork to be done. (Aerospace people excepted where it's actually required) Oh, and it is too noisy to concentrate in this open plan office without headphones.
- dev360 10y ago
  That was a funny anecdote about Van Halen, had to read up on it. Here's the link if anybody is interested: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
- pasbesoin 10y ago
  It's also a signal as to who's in control of the development process. (Hint: Not the developers.)
smoyer 10y ago
I may be an old-timer and I typed my code into CP/M on a text-only display starting circa 1983 or so. I had to compile the code too and guess what ... it was fast! But when you've only got 64K RAM there's a limit to how sophisticated a program can be. And when you're writing the type of tools we could write back then, your compilation cycles would be fast too. Would I go back? Some of my CSS files are bigger than the hand-coded assembly language programs I wrote back then but I still love what computing has become. Many facets of today's systems seem almost unimaginable (except that I was an avid sci-fi reader). So I'll join you in demanding a fast machine so that I'm not waiting for code to compile. And who knows what we'll be building in another 30 years?

by V-2 10y ago

Nursie 10y ago

Building on your own desktop? That seems rather archaic. Well-connected and integrated access to a massive multicore build machine seems a little more modern. As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff.

splatcollision 10y ago
Sometimes once in a rare while you want to be able to work totally offline, or in a low-connectivity environment. For example I'm currently on a commuter train on an hour+ ride into the city, and if I want to do everything locally, I can. Options are good. (PS: ask me about working remotely!)
koder2016 10y ago
I guess using some of my 8 logical cores for background static analysis is archaic now?
V-2 10y ago
I should be able to run unit tests locally, and have it happen quickly. Added to that, I'm often travelling on the job and sometimes code on the go, massive multicore build machine may be out of my reach > As time goes on (16 years as a dev now) I find myself a lot less concerned about this stuff. That's the point, we shouldn't be concerned, and it's best achieved by giving us equipment that lets us take this stuff off our minds
- Nursie 10y ago
  I think the point is that as you gain experience you realise how unimportant your local terminal is. Engineers tend to grow out of it. Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > as you gain experience you realise how unimportant your local terminal is. If I may be blunt, bullshit. Working on a remote server, especially one not on your local lan, is a lag filled pain in the ass. Even if you decide to work on a local editor and upload to the cloud, your write-test cycle will be slower, and the best editors will require quite a few CPU cycles themselves to provide (their version of) intellisense, syntax highlighting, and documentation. And this doesn't even cover ensuring that the computer is capable of handling remote conferencing - a resource drain to end all resource drains on laptops. I'd go one step further and say that as I gained experience, I realized the value of the productivity gains from low latency and the freedom offered by working locally (I even keep local copies of documentation websites, so I never have to worry about them being down). > Not that many coders 'often' travel on the job, as a proportion. Most are office-bound. Internet can still go out in an office. So can power. People travel, work from home, and sometimes work from a conference. Why limit your employees for the sake of saving 1% of a software developer's salary (less, actually, when you consider amortization)?
  - V-2 10y ago
    Well, my experience on the matter aligns with what falcolas says
  - 10y ago
gbog 10y ago
Building, editing, testing, all of that is better done remotely with ssh and gnu screen or similar.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Why? Not all software is designed to run on servers. In some cases, building locally will give a quicker response cycle. Editing locally is almost always a better user experience. Especially if your servers aren't in the same building. And plenty of other reasons (travel, flexibility, ...)
- falcolas 10y ago
  I personally disagree. That requires that you use vim or emacs, which is not feasable (or even desirable) for many programmers. It also requires a stable and low latency network connection; something which is not always available. Anecdotally, I had to work this way once for an employer. It worked rather well, but our "development" machines were on-premises, and when they went down, everybody was down. I was also extremely limited in what I could download and run, since the machine was shared with other developers. Not very productive. Though, I did get really good with Vim, so I am thankful for that.
  - gbog 10y ago
    Use vim or emacs not feasible? not desirable? If most of the greatest programmers use them, if you're a wannabe programmer how would you not use these tools? It's like willing to be a cowboy but for thanks to the horse and the gun...
    - pjc50 10y ago
      If you're writing C# you'll be much faster with intellisense and autocomplete. It's quite amazing how much help it is, especially before you reach expert level. Occasionally you encounter weird toolchains where some stuff is much more convenient to do from the IDE, so you end up editing files in emacs then having Quartus or Vivado open to look at their reports. (People should be a bit more specific about their working environment before confidently declaring the best way to do things!)

protomyth 10y ago

>> "To insult a new hire by providing only a single 4:3 monitor? I can't work like this." > I can work like this, but I prefer two monitors. How much does a monitor cost anyway? Having two displays is much more convenient. I now prefer a LG 21:9 34". They are fairly cheap, have a good quality screen for long viewing, and the extra width is a real help. I wouldn't buy the thunderbolt version as it really doesn't do the thunderbolt properly. I think any programmer or manager bitching about developers chairs or screens is a sadist and doesn't really get we have to live with this stuff and it affects our health.

oz 10y ago
I have an Asus 21:9 29", 2560x1080, not 3440x1440 like the LG you mention (which I've considered). The extra width is nice, and the aspect ratio is perfect when watching movies, but I find I need more vertical pixels. Instead of the 34", wouldn't make sense to just go 4K (3824x2160) and get it over with? You're getting more vertical AND horizontal pixels. Personally, I'm salivating at the Seiki SM40UNP (40"). Anything smaller at 4K resolution and you'll need display scaling, negating the size gain. I don't think my 2013 ultrabook can drive it at 60Hz, but there are apocryphal reports that I may be able to eke out 50Hz.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Well, when I bought it before the 4K was available, but LG is supposed to have a 4K equivalent coming in 21:9 which would have the same vertical of 2,160 pixels (giving 5,040 x 2,160). I'll get that when it comes out because I like ultra-wide versus buying 2 monitors.
- iwintermute 10y ago
  >> Anything smaller at 4K resolution I have 32" 16:9 Benq at 4K and it's perfectly usable without scaling. You can think about it this way: 32" is double 16" monitors, and 15,6" monitors (rather popular in notebooks) with 1080p are quite usable. And it took me few days to adapt from previous 27" 1080 monitor.

pjc50 10y ago

The single 4:3 monitor is rather like the famous Van Halen rider about "no brown M&Ms": it's an opportunity to red-flag the employer. Monitors are cheap, at most one or two developer-days of salary. If you can't get a monitor, what happens when you need to buy some more specific piece of equipment? A previous employer had an extremely liberal policy on letting us just buy anything that cost <£100. Obviously we recognised this was a privilege that would be taken away if abused, so we didn't use it much, but it was tremendously liberating. Want an evaluation board? Need a cable? Or a book? Done! Previously I've had to do a PO for a box of M5 bolts. That's the morale-draining opposite, especially if you have to sit around wasting several orders of magnitude more than the cost for the paperwork to be done. (Aerospace people excepted where it's actually required) Oh, and it is too noisy to concentrate in this open plan office without headphones.

dev360 10y ago
That was a funny anecdote about Van Halen, had to read up on it. Here's the link if anybody is interested: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
pasbesoin 10y ago
It's also a signal as to who's in control of the development process. (Hint: Not the developers.)

smoyer 10y ago

I may be an old-timer and I typed my code into CP/M on a text-only display starting circa 1983 or so. I had to compile the code too and guess what ... it was fast! But when you've only got 64K RAM there's a limit to how sophisticated a program can be. And when you're writing the type of tools we could write back then, your compilation cycles would be fast too. Would I go back? Some of my CSS files are bigger than the hand-coded assembly language programs I wrote back then but I still love what computing has become. Many facets of today's systems seem almost unimaginable (except that I was an avid sci-fi reader). So I'll join you in demanding a fast machine so that I'm not waiting for code to compile. And who knows what we'll be building in another 30 years?