I spent a decade working in engineering at Intel. Basically all design work (as of 2016, and for 10+ years prior) is done over VNC to Linux servers in data cent

I spent a decade working in engineering at Intel. Basically all design work (as of 2016, and for 10+ years prior) is done over VNC to Linux servers in data centers. The experience was barely tolerable over 100mbit Ethernet to an on-site data center, and anything less was fairly abominable for just about anything other than working in a black and white terminal. The majority of the work is fairly graphical and most engineers rarely have the luxury of connecting to an on site data center. Over the years the situation both improved and worsened: Pluses: - circa 2010 some of us were lucky enough to get gigabit Ethernet connected to our desk. - circa 2010-2015 there were improvements to the VNC protocol like JPG and Zlib compression that helped a lot with bandwidth constrained situations (nearly all) - circa 2014 a lot of us got 802.11ac capable office APs and laptops, often pushing 300+ mbps reliably. Minuses: - The company shut down a bunch of datacenters and setup “hub” sites. Making most of us work over high latency WAN links even in the office. - More and more work seemed to get organized across sites, making many of us remote to far-off datacenters even if we were local to a hub. No one in engineering management or IT seemed to take the problem seriously. No wonder the company has floundered so much. To me an unresponsive interface completely spoils flow and dramatically reduces my productivity.