7 ms·

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

rjzzleep 8y ago
Last time I worked in big corporate I had to use their laptop even if I didn't plug mine into anything, because of security. At some point said laptop got stolen and I sent a buying request for a new one. Took a year without feedback and a heated discussion for my boss to accuse me for having been to passive on it. I was then using my own laptop. At that point you can't even call it shadow IT anymore. Any buying requests go through the direct supervisor, the financial department, the director of the company, then back to the supervisor for the final signature. And because it's Germany, it was on paper. When I say any buying request, I mean any. From any programming book, to any accounting book for finance or any HR book. You'd think people at the top have better things to do. You think that, until you hear the department heads discuss which excel format files should be saved in.
dagw 8y ago
They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot? Well I mean they obviously can... First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012. Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me have a machine with top of line specs with several cards or, heaven forbid, several machines, (but they'll happily let me have a laptop that costs just as much for less than half the performance).
- Moter8 8y ago
  Ahh yes, corporate laptops. At our enterprise, we have HP ultrabooks or however they are called. Windows 7, 32 Bit. You know, it has a decent i5 on it, but there is some specific bottleneck making it terrible. Every employee that sits in an office has this piece of crap. Takes 3 minutes to start IntelliJ. Since some years ~50 developers were able to get Macbooks, luckily I am one of them, else I'd just be pissed off every single work day.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Probably some corporate required antivirus package.
- bluGill 8y ago
  We have had luck begging for "just one" to try it out. Then run some benchmarks. We were able to show that the one developer with the fast workstation compiled faster, and therefore was more productive. A few numbers with dollar signs and management told IT to stop stalling and get everybody a good workstation - things happened fast. You need to repeat that every couple years though.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Not to mention you'll be on some awful Dell tower with no 6/8-pin power connectors and the case won't fit anything reasonably powerful, and the IT gatekeepers have no idea what you mean when you explain this problem.
sheeshkebab 8y ago
No, not in most corporate it shops... card had to be “procured” through the corporate vendor, support has to be in place, drivers for some shitty obsolete os flavor has to be installed... that’s assuming you can even find a server in rack that is recent enough to even run it all, if not then same shit has to happen with the server. It’s all ITs own fault frankly - or more like fault of corporations approaching IT as mostly a desktop Helpdesk support.
mynegation 8y ago
They seriously can’t. Typically if you want to buy some hardware in a big Corp you go to some preapptoved internal catalog to pick up from one or two models of desktop or a laptop from vendors like Dell, HP, or Lenovo - whatever was preapproved. Sometimes you can fine tune specs but not in a very wide range. Buying anything outside of that will require senior level approval and - heaven forbid - “vendor approval study” (or similar verbiage).
- Johnny555 8y ago
  I worked at a startup that started doing that, the company was only around 250 people at the time, but the VP of IT was hired from a fortune 100 company, and he instituted the catalog approach of only 2 supported laptop configs (13" or 15"), and one desktop. When I left the company, the engineering director was working out how to let his team go rogue - basically handling all of their own IT support, the only caveat being that they had to install IT's intrusion detection software, but aside from that, an engineer would be able to buy any machine within a certain budget.
drewg123 8y ago
When I worked at Google, I really missed the dual monitor setup I had had at my previous job. I asked my manager how to get a 2nd monitor. Apparently, since I had the larger monitor, I was not allowed to get a 2nd one without all kinds of hassle. I asked if I was allowed to just buy one from Amazon and plug it in, and I was told no. I finally just grabbed an older one that had been sitting in the hallway of the cube-farm next to us for a few days, waiting for to be picked up and re-used. I'm sure somebody's inventory sheet finally made sense 2 years later when I quit, and they collected that monitor along with the rest of my stuff.
- grogenaut 8y ago
  When I started at Amazon they gave us dual 22" monitors. I bought dual 27" dells and a gfx card to back them and plugged it in. I also explained how much I was swapping with 8gb and a virt (45 minutes of lost productivity a day), and ram was $86. Manager happily expensed ram for me and the rest of the team . 2 years later that was the standard setup. Now I have 7 monitors and 3 PC's from multiple projects and oses and hardware reups and interns. None funded by me. The dells are happily on my quad tree at home. Amazon also allows you to byoc and image it. Images are easily available. Bias for action gets u far.
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    TIL Bias for action.
    - gebeeson 8y ago
      As did I and the excellent rabbit hole that it led to.
  - jbgreer 8y ago
    A colleague at my office recently brought in a 43" 4K TV to use as a monitor. He was reimbursed immediately. After a few days I bought one, too, took it home, and took the 2x 23" monitors it replaced to the office. In a different department another friend systematically acquired new large monitors for her dev team. Her management chain complained about the expense. Bias for action not only gets you far, it attracts folks to your team inside a company. ;-)
pjmlp 8y ago
In most medium size companies, think Fortune XXX, only IT is allowed to do that, after getting all the required approvals. And good luck getting the cost center ID for the initial ticket submission to start with.
acd10j 8y ago
Most of time standard power supplies and cabinet of these Desktop does not support 1080Ti power consumption.
- thisisjeffchen 8y ago
  Hey there, I'm the writer for the article. I have another article planned that will talk about part picking and actual building. For now though, here is the parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/B6LJ7P https://pcpartpicker.com/b/B6LJ7P w/ 1600W psu.
  - davidkuhta 8y ago
    Great read! As an aside your hyperlink to HomebrewAIClub accidentally included a comma.
solatic 8y ago
You're neglecting management costs. IT teams don't buy hardware with corporate credit cards, they have to work through pre-existing requisition processes that properly budget for the hardware, make sure support contracts are in place, etc. You have to migrate whatever workload off the server where you installed the GPU (politically problematic since Murphy promises you that your users will be connecting to the server by its IP address, or the workload is "mission critical" and can't be stopped, or whatever) and reserve the server for GPU work. If you're running something like vCenter to virtualize your datacenter resources, you need to make sure that VMware picks up on the GPU in the new machine, doesn't schedule new VMs without GPU requirements on the server with the new GPU, etc. Comments like these (why can't I just do X?), it's like the difference between being single and being in a serious relationship. When you're single, you can do whatever you want. When you're in a serious relationship, you can't just make whatever decisions you want without talking to your partner. Well, big corporate enterprise is like that on steroids, because instead of having one partner, you have several or dozens, and everyone needs to buy in.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  Why I as developer should worry about this? It's their job.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  How often do employers wait for their employees' approval before making a decision?
- sytelus 8y ago
  In most (good) companies team/group have budgets where large portions are at discretion to group manager. I would expect group managers to approve for such hardware requests. It’s much harder to justify $4K bills on cloud services. This is not IT issue and I think this thread has got derailed little here.
- candiodari 8y ago
  However, this cannot justify just any disparity in prices. Data science FTW ! Capex => Opex has a name. It's called "a loan". So let's model cloud usage as a loan. Let's assume you want, for an employee, a machine learning rig and you set depreciation on 2 years. Let's also assume that the article is correct about the ballpark figures, somewhere around $1400/month for renting, and $3000 for the machine. And let's ignore the difference in power usage, extra space, bandwidth, ... (which is going to be 2 digit dollars at the very most anyway, since you need all that for the employee in the first place) So how much interest does cloud charge for this Capex => Opex change ? Well 33600/30000.5 or 613.5% per year. Pretty much every bank on the planet will offer very low credit score companies 30% loans, even 10% is very realistic. There are no words ... Just give the man his bloody machine. Hell, give him 5, 4 just in case 3 fail, and 1 for Crysis just to be a "nice" guy (you're not really being so nice: you're saving money) and you still come out ahead of the cloud. We both know why this doesn't happen, the real reason: you don't trust your employees. Letting this employee have that machine would immediately cause a jealousy fight within the company, and cause a major problem. That's of course why the GP comment is right: leave this bloody nightmare of a company, today.

Last time I worked in big corporate I had to use their laptop even if I didn't plug mine into anything, because of security. At some point said laptop got stolen and I sent a buying request for a new one. Took a year without feedback and a heated discussion for my boss to accuse me for having been to passive on it. I was then using my own laptop. At that point you can't even call it shadow IT anymore. Any buying requests go through the direct supervisor, the financial department, the director of the company, then back to the supervisor for the final signature. And because it's Germany, it was on paper. When I say any buying request, I mean any. From any programming book, to any accounting book for finance or any HR book. You'd think people at the top have better things to do. You think that, until you hear the department heads discuss which excel format files should be saved in.

dagw 8y ago

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot? Well I mean they obviously can... First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012. Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me have a machine with top of line specs with several cards or, heaven forbid, several machines, (but they'll happily let me have a laptop that costs just as much for less than half the performance).

Moter8 8y ago
Ahh yes, corporate laptops. At our enterprise, we have HP ultrabooks or however they are called. Windows 7, 32 Bit. You know, it has a decent i5 on it, but there is some specific bottleneck making it terrible. Every employee that sits in an office has this piece of crap. Takes 3 minutes to start IntelliJ. Since some years ~50 developers were able to get Macbooks, luckily I am one of them, else I'd just be pissed off every single work day.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Probably some corporate required antivirus package.
bluGill 8y ago
We have had luck begging for "just one" to try it out. Then run some benchmarks. We were able to show that the one developer with the fast workstation compiled faster, and therefore was more productive. A few numbers with dollar signs and management told IT to stop stalling and get everybody a good workstation - things happened fast. You need to repeat that every couple years though.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
Not to mention you'll be on some awful Dell tower with no 6/8-pin power connectors and the case won't fit anything reasonably powerful, and the IT gatekeepers have no idea what you mean when you explain this problem.

sheeshkebab 8y ago

No, not in most corporate it shops... card had to be “procured” through the corporate vendor, support has to be in place, drivers for some shitty obsolete os flavor has to be installed... that’s assuming you can even find a server in rack that is recent enough to even run it all, if not then same shit has to happen with the server. It’s all ITs own fault frankly - or more like fault of corporations approaching IT as mostly a desktop Helpdesk support.

mynegation 8y ago

They seriously can’t. Typically if you want to buy some hardware in a big Corp you go to some preapptoved internal catalog to pick up from one or two models of desktop or a laptop from vendors like Dell, HP, or Lenovo - whatever was preapproved. Sometimes you can fine tune specs but not in a very wide range. Buying anything outside of that will require senior level approval and - heaven forbid - “vendor approval study” (or similar verbiage).

Johnny555 8y ago
I worked at a startup that started doing that, the company was only around 250 people at the time, but the VP of IT was hired from a fortune 100 company, and he instituted the catalog approach of only 2 supported laptop configs (13" or 15"), and one desktop. When I left the company, the engineering director was working out how to let his team go rogue - basically handling all of their own IT support, the only caveat being that they had to install IT's intrusion detection software, but aside from that, an engineer would be able to buy any machine within a certain budget.

drewg123 8y ago

When I worked at Google, I really missed the dual monitor setup I had had at my previous job. I asked my manager how to get a 2nd monitor. Apparently, since I had the larger monitor, I was not allowed to get a 2nd one without all kinds of hassle. I asked if I was allowed to just buy one from Amazon and plug it in, and I was told no. I finally just grabbed an older one that had been sitting in the hallway of the cube-farm next to us for a few days, waiting for to be picked up and re-used. I'm sure somebody's inventory sheet finally made sense 2 years later when I quit, and they collected that monitor along with the rest of my stuff.

grogenaut 8y ago
When I started at Amazon they gave us dual 22" monitors. I bought dual 27" dells and a gfx card to back them and plugged it in. I also explained how much I was swapping with 8gb and a virt (45 minutes of lost productivity a day), and ram was $86. Manager happily expensed ram for me and the rest of the team . 2 years later that was the standard setup. Now I have 7 monitors and 3 PC's from multiple projects and oses and hardware reups and interns. None funded by me. The dells are happily on my quad tree at home. Amazon also allows you to byoc and image it. Images are easily available. Bias for action gets u far.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  TIL Bias for action.
  - gebeeson 8y ago
    As did I and the excellent rabbit hole that it led to.
- jbgreer 8y ago
  A colleague at my office recently brought in a 43" 4K TV to use as a monitor. He was reimbursed immediately. After a few days I bought one, too, took it home, and took the 2x 23" monitors it replaced to the office. In a different department another friend systematically acquired new large monitors for her dev team. Her management chain complained about the expense. Bias for action not only gets you far, it attracts folks to your team inside a company. ;-)

pjmlp 8y ago

In most medium size companies, think Fortune XXX, only IT is allowed to do that, after getting all the required approvals. And good luck getting the cost center ID for the initial ticket submission to start with.

acd10j 8y ago

Most of time standard power supplies and cabinet of these Desktop does not support 1080Ti power consumption.

thisisjeffchen 8y ago
Hey there, I'm the writer for the article. I have another article planned that will talk about part picking and actual building. For now though, here is the parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/B6LJ7P https://pcpartpicker.com/b/B6LJ7P w/ 1600W psu.
- davidkuhta 8y ago
  Great read! As an aside your hyperlink to HomebrewAIClub accidentally included a comma.

solatic 8y ago

You're neglecting management costs. IT teams don't buy hardware with corporate credit cards, they have to work through pre-existing requisition processes that properly budget for the hardware, make sure support contracts are in place, etc. You have to migrate whatever workload off the server where you installed the GPU (politically problematic since Murphy promises you that your users will be connecting to the server by its IP address, or the workload is "mission critical" and can't be stopped, or whatever) and reserve the server for GPU work. If you're running something like vCenter to virtualize your datacenter resources, you need to make sure that VMware picks up on the GPU in the new machine, doesn't schedule new VMs without GPU requirements on the server with the new GPU, etc. Comments like these (why can't I just do X?), it's like the difference between being single and being in a serious relationship. When you're single, you can do whatever you want. When you're in a serious relationship, you can't just make whatever decisions you want without talking to your partner. Well, big corporate enterprise is like that on steroids, because instead of having one partner, you have several or dozens, and everyone needs to buy in.

wetpaws 8y ago
Why I as developer should worry about this? It's their job.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
How often do employers wait for their employees' approval before making a decision?
sytelus 8y ago
In most (good) companies team/group have budgets where large portions are at discretion to group manager. I would expect group managers to approve for such hardware requests. It’s much harder to justify $4K bills on cloud services. This is not IT issue and I think this thread has got derailed little here.
candiodari 8y ago
However, this cannot justify just any disparity in prices. Data science FTW ! Capex => Opex has a name. It's called "a loan". So let's model cloud usage as a loan. Let's assume you want, for an employee, a machine learning rig and you set depreciation on 2 years. Let's also assume that the article is correct about the ballpark figures, somewhere around $1400/month for renting, and $3000 for the machine. And let's ignore the difference in power usage, extra space, bandwidth, ... (which is going to be 2 digit dollars at the very most anyway, since you need all that for the employee in the first place) So how much interest does cloud charge for this Capex => Opex change ? Well 33600/30000.5 or 613.5% per year. Pretty much every bank on the planet will offer very low credit score companies 30% loans, even 10% is very realistic. There are no words ... Just give the man his bloody machine. Hell, give him 5, 4 just in case 3 fail, and 1 for Crysis just to be a "nice" guy (you're not really being so nice: you're saving money) and you still come out ahead of the cloud. We both know why this doesn't happen, the real reason: you don't trust your employees. Letting this employee have that machine would immediately cause a jealousy fight within the company, and cause a major problem. That's of course why the GP comment is right: leave this bloody nightmare of a company, today.