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The most bullshit thing I've experienced in my engineering career so far was making "business cases". I was to make a business case for getting me a decent PC

The most bullshit thing I've experienced in my engineering career so far was making "business cases". I was to make a business case for getting me a decent PC that would allow me to perform simulations that would allow me to test some concepts without risking damage to hardware. Another business case I had to make was when I proposed we give give out one unit of our product (valued at 400-1000 eur) for Google Summer of Code developer working on a library that we supported and it easily generated around half of the product sales. In the same company I had to get out of my way to make them buy heaters in winter and fans in the summer because the building was a badly insulated warehouse made of metal. This experience made me highly allergic to bullshit rules and being cheap. My philosophy now is that is you can't afford a reasonable working conditions and hardware then I can't afford working for you.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Yeah I needed more RAM to load humongous log files and filter them. Submit the business case - avoid 20 minute waits to do a search, save hours each day and finish the project faster. So, of course the RAM showed up 2 weeks after the project was over.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  I’m lucky to work in a company where I can just sign in to my company Amazon account and buy more RAM. I might sanity check with a colleague before doing so if the expense is over £50. One of my old colleagues came from Amazon where he had to buy his own RAM upgrade to do his work as they wouldn’t give him more than 4GB and he did heavy Excel work. They did not let him expense it.
- bklaasen 8y ago
  I've simply ponied up for the extra RAM myself and neither asked for permission nor forgiveness. The €70-odd it cost was worth it to me. I left the RAM in place as a nice surprise for whoever inherited the laptop after me.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    I mentioned to the IT guy that I was going out to buy my own damn RAM. He nearly had a heart attack - "Don't open the case!" I think the remote India IT lords would know if I opened the case and he'd hear about it.
  - wil421 8y ago
    I did the same at my last company and used some old RAM from a laptop that broke. Just switched jobs recently and now I’m realizing I forgot to take it out before I turned in my laptop. Luckily my new company provides spec-ed out laptops with more RAM for software engineers. It’s also easier to get more RAM at my new company as long as your job code is engineering.
- gaius 8y ago
  At a previous job a cow-orker spent literally months trying to get a bigger HD. I had the same issue, so I asked one of the department secretaries to order me a whole new PC that happened to have a bigger disk in it, and it arrived a few days later. This may seem profligate but it would have been much, much cheaper for the company than the hours my colleague wasted dealing with the bureaucracy.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Yeah I needed more RAM to load humongous log files and filter them. Submit the business case - avoid 20 minute waits to do a search, save hours each day and finish the project faster. So, of course the RAM showed up 2 weeks after the project was over.

danpalmer 8y ago
I’m lucky to work in a company where I can just sign in to my company Amazon account and buy more RAM. I might sanity check with a colleague before doing so if the expense is over £50. One of my old colleagues came from Amazon where he had to buy his own RAM upgrade to do his work as they wouldn’t give him more than 4GB and he did heavy Excel work. They did not let him expense it.
bklaasen 8y ago
I've simply ponied up for the extra RAM myself and neither asked for permission nor forgiveness. The €70-odd it cost was worth it to me. I left the RAM in place as a nice surprise for whoever inherited the laptop after me.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  I mentioned to the IT guy that I was going out to buy my own damn RAM. He nearly had a heart attack - "Don't open the case!" I think the remote India IT lords would know if I opened the case and he'd hear about it.
- wil421 8y ago
  I did the same at my last company and used some old RAM from a laptop that broke. Just switched jobs recently and now I’m realizing I forgot to take it out before I turned in my laptop. Luckily my new company provides spec-ed out laptops with more RAM for software engineers. It’s also easier to get more RAM at my new company as long as your job code is engineering.
gaius 8y ago
At a previous job a cow-orker spent literally months trying to get a bigger HD. I had the same issue, so I asked one of the department secretaries to order me a whole new PC that happened to have a bigger disk in it, and it arrived a few days later. This may seem profligate but it would have been much, much cheaper for the company than the hours my colleague wasted dealing with the bureaucracy.