7 ms·

Most relevant bit for geeks: "Build/buy your dream computer." Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't und

by c1sc0 16y ago

Most relevant bit for geeks: "Build/buy your dream computer." Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't understand why so many companies are reluctant to do this.

eru 16y ago
If you are in a company that does not allow it, at least get them to install VirtualBox or some other virtualisation program. (Or quit. But I understand real life is made of compromises.)
- devmonk 16y ago
  Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
  - IgorPartola 16y ago
    At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
    - barrkel 16y ago
      I generally find the quality of multiprocessing in the guest OS is not good; nor is accelerated graphics. Most VMs are ok if all you need is single proc non visual performance, though. Disk IO is often poor too.
      - cschep 16y ago
        An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
        barrkel 16y ago
        I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
        eru 16y ago
        Yes, scheduling on multiple virtual processors is still not really a solved problem.
rumpelstiltskin 16y ago
Build/buy your dream computer. What's the limit tho?
- varjag 16y ago
  Since they used computer in singular, you probably can't build a cluster.
  - rumpelstiltskin 16y ago
    Sorry, I meant price.
heresy 16y ago
This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill. I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer. Sadly this is rather common. My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.
- HSO 16y ago
  It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.
  - brianritchie 16y ago
    The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
  - warfangle 16y ago
    Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse. Except there was photoshop involved. And a solitary 15" monitor. And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp). After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
DannoHung 16y ago
Hmmm... what would it take to drive half a dozen 30" monitors?
- mattmillr 16y ago
  A Mac Pro with two ATI Radeon HD 5770's gives you 4 Mini Display Port and 2 Dual-Link DVI outputs.
mattmcknight 16y ago
Sadly, the whole dropbox site is blocked by the firewall at the client I am currently supporting (and they gave me a 15" monitor). Craziest though is they only allow Firefox 2.0- I keep sending them the vulnerabilities list. I run chromium instead...
sanj 16y ago
Pfft. "root on your box" is so last week. Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box. I'd add "modulo the live site", but when I needed that, it was made available. I think of this as the computer equivalent of the HP story of one of the founders using an axe to break into a storage closet so engineers had access to equipment over the weekend. (blah blah blah we're hiring blah blah blah)
- smokinn 16y ago
  When I saw the "we're hiring" comment I went to check out your site. I'm sorry to say but your careers section is pretty horrible. Your About Us page is blank: http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/chronicle http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/chronicle There's Learn about us in 30 seconds and More about us ... on the right side that seem like they should be links but they aren't. Your jobs page: http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/jobs http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/jobs is the standard outsourced and absolutely terrible job database search. No offense intended but based on your career section alone I would never apply there. I might apply if I met people at a networking event and they convinced me but definitely not based on your site info.
  - sanj 16y ago
    You're totally right. In fact, we have a project underway to try to make it suck less. Having said that, if you're anywhere nearby, drop me a line and just come in for lunch. It'll be more compelling than any jobs page we could put up.
    - smokinn 16y ago
      I'm in Montreal, definitely not nearby. I'm not looking for a job either I'm just a nosy person. =) I'll take a rain-check though in case I do someday end up in Newton.
- cperciva 16y ago
  Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box. Ugh. I understand the principle of empowering developers, but some basic security would be nice...

by c1sc0 16y ago

eru 16y ago

If you are in a company that does not allow it, at least get them to install VirtualBox or some other virtualisation program. (Or quit. But I understand real life is made of compromises.)

devmonk 16y ago
Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
- IgorPartola 16y ago
  At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
  - barrkel 16y ago
    I generally find the quality of multiprocessing in the guest OS is not good; nor is accelerated graphics. Most VMs are ok if all you need is single proc non visual performance, though. Disk IO is often poor too.
    - cschep 16y ago
      An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
      - barrkel 16y ago
        I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
        eru 16y ago
        Yes, scheduling on multiple virtual processors is still not really a solved problem.

rumpelstiltskin 16y ago

Build/buy your dream computer. What's the limit tho?

varjag 16y ago
Since they used computer in singular, you probably can't build a cluster.
- rumpelstiltskin 16y ago
  Sorry, I meant price.

heresy 16y ago

This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill. I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer. Sadly this is rather common. My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.

HSO 16y ago
It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.
- brianritchie 16y ago
  The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
- warfangle 16y ago
  Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse. Except there was photoshop involved. And a solitary 15" monitor. And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp). After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..

DannoHung 16y ago

Hmmm... what would it take to drive half a dozen 30" monitors?

mattmillr 16y ago
A Mac Pro with two ATI Radeon HD 5770's gives you 4 Mini Display Port and 2 Dual-Link DVI outputs.

mattmcknight 16y ago

Sadly, the whole dropbox site is blocked by the firewall at the client I am currently supporting (and they gave me a 15" monitor). Craziest though is they only allow Firefox 2.0- I keep sending them the vulnerabilities list. I run chromium instead...

sanj 16y ago

Pfft. "root on your box" is so last week. Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box. I'd add "modulo the live site", but when I needed that, it was made available. I think of this as the computer equivalent of the HP story of one of the founders using an axe to break into a storage closet so engineers had access to equipment over the weekend. (blah blah blah we're hiring blah blah blah)

smokinn 16y ago
When I saw the "we're hiring" comment I went to check out your site. I'm sorry to say but your careers section is pretty horrible. Your About Us page is blank: http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/chronicle http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/chronicle There's Learn about us in 30 seconds and More about us ... on the right side that seem like they should be links but they aren't. Your jobs page: http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/jobs http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/jobs is the standard outsourced and absolutely terrible job database search. No offense intended but based on your career section alone I would never apply there. I might apply if I met people at a networking event and they convinced me but definitely not based on your site info.
- sanj 16y ago
  You're totally right. In fact, we have a project underway to try to make it suck less. Having said that, if you're anywhere nearby, drop me a line and just come in for lunch. It'll be more compelling than any jobs page we could put up.
  - smokinn 16y ago
    I'm in Montreal, definitely not nearby. I'm not looking for a job either I'm just a nosy person. =) I'll take a rain-check though in case I do someday end up in Newton.
cperciva 16y ago
Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box. Ugh. I understand the principle of empowering developers, but some basic security would be nice...