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This only makes sense if you pretend developer time is free and low morale has no effect on productivity. 10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequa

This only makes sense if you pretend developer time is free and low morale has no effect on productivity. 10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequate hardware means you are paying at least $4k per year per dev for that shit pile of a laptop. Usually it costs more than 10 minutes a day too. The hit to morale when you tell a professional they can't pick their tools is even worse. Now they are spending at least 1 hour a day looking for a new job because devs are good enough at math to know if you can't afford a new laptop you've got six months of runway tops. If you believe employee happiness has any correlation to productivity you always buy them whatever hardware makes them happy. It is a small price to pay.

jseliger 8y ago
This conversation reminds me of that conversation from a day or two ago, when a writer argued that, if you're trying to hire senior engineers, you need to woo them, rather than expecting them to woo you. In high-end job markets, hardware is so cheap compared to salary, etc. that there is no reason not get the top stuff. If you don't, that may impinge productivity, and in addition it will send a very negative signal.
- munk-a 8y ago
  Honestly this doesn't just go for high-end jobs. If you're a coffee shop and refuse to shell out for some nice stools for employees to take a rest on then you're just not using math. All labour in the US costs far more than a decent chair or a nice ergonomic keyboard and mouse, a hands free headset... All of these things are peanuts compared to the costs of employing someone.
  - grawprog 8y ago
    Yup. I really appreciate working a place where my employer understands this. Any tools, equipment, technicians we need to bring in...anything...we just say and we get it. The difference between this and my last job where we used equipment until it broke down...and then had to keep using it...where even a pair of earplugs seemed to be a source of stress...it's like night and day. I honestly don't think I could work for a company that cheaps out on equipment and supplies anymore. The difference it makes every day to the quality of not only the work I do, but the working conditions for me and the people I work with is worth it.
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    I keep telling my employer this, and similar arguments, but no matter what, they still won't buy me one of these: https://www.mwelab.com/en/ https://www.mwelab.com/en/
    - fouc 8y ago
      Buy it yourself. "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness."
      - xupybd 8y ago
        I know we're not meant to say people didn't read the article. But did you click the link to the chair? I think it was a joke.
        fouc 8y ago
        Yeah I clicked the link. I was also joking, saying he should buy it with his own funds, naturally the business wouldn't reimburse him :P
    - bradknowles 8y ago
      Why does that page require javascript to be enabled before you can see anything? ;(
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Ah, I’m sure that’s because it would be hard to fit in the office, not because of the price. It’s actually cheap enough that you could buy it yourself if you wanted to. It certainly went into my bookmarks, just in case I ever actually need a literal battlestation.
  - achillesheels 8y ago
    I seriously think there are power games being played by employers who give their labor terrible working conditions when the marginal improvement would have such a tremendous morale boost. Perhaps out of worldly impotence, such an employer feels satisfied in seeing the toil of someone subservient.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Basically anything is cheaper than salary. It’s why I don’t understand companies that do things like take away the free coffee to ‘save money’. If I can provide free coffee to the whole office on my own salary alone, maybe that’s not a great way to save money.
  - around_here 8y ago
    super relevant: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
seanwilson 8y ago
> Usually it costs more than 10 minutes a day too. Anything that slows you down or irritates you eats up more minutes than just the raw time you're waiting too. Say something takes 1 second to compile vs 6 seconds on slower hardware and you're having to recompile ten times to fix a bug. The raw waiting time might only be 10 seconds vs 60 seconds but that extra pause of having to wait every time to see if you've fixed bug might annoy you enough to drain significantly more productivity out of you. You're best keeping your developers happy so they enjoy plowing through the work instead of hating it.
- nikanj 8y ago
  Once it takes more than 10 seconds, many people are likely to alt-tab to ”fun” - and often take quite a while to tab back
- paublyrne 8y ago
  You won't get a 6x performance improvement from replacing a two year old laptop. Laptop performance improvements have been tailing off for a while.
- tasuki 8y ago
  The OP mentioned a two year old computer. Do things compile 6 times slower than on today's computer? I'd guess at most 1/6th slower, ie 5/6ths of the time...
  - seanwilson 8y ago
    It's a hypothetical example to illustrate the point that "anything that slows you down or irritates you eats up more minutes than just the raw time you're waiting". For the sake of a few thousand dollars for a laptop that can be used for several years, even a 1% increase in efficiency is very likely worth it.
scarface74 8y ago
If you are using Node as the original poster mentioned, what is a slightly faster computer doing for you? You’re not spending time waiting on a compiler.
- sambroner 8y ago
  What if you're using TypeScript, creating a few packages, and bundling them?
  - jfrankamp 8y ago
    then you probably only need a 486 or so? programs can manipulate text quite effectively using ancient cpus.
    - marton78 8y ago
      Clearly you have never used TypeScript, created a few packages, and bundled them.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Sounds like better tools are in order. Golang produces results instantaneously for example.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      Almost no present software will run acceptably on a 486 since machines orders of magnitude faster are available at walmart for $300 the question of what software would is mostly academic.
      - romeisendcoming 8y ago
        In 1999 we were 'upgrading' to Evergreen 586s in K12 for a lucky few boys and girls. Good times and a lot of nothing going on. PIO4 and PATA with PCI buses clocked at 33 MHZ. Can you imagine really trying to run 20+ year old tech in developer space? 8 - 10 MB/s throughput and 70 bogomips?
dna_polymerase 8y ago
> 10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequate hardware means you are paying at least $4k per year per dev for that shit pile of a laptop. This only holds true if your developers are 100% efficient programming every second the machine is running. But let's face it. The first hour of the day is most certainly not the most productive (10 minute boot? fine, I'll make coffee meanwhile). You could easily schedule a meeting, like a stand-up, while the machines fire up, if those 10 minutes really would be necessary.
- jacobsenscott 8y ago
  It is more like - this tests takes just long enough that I can jump over to hacker news for a few minutes...
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Mathematically flawed there is no reason to suspect you can subtract the time spent waiting for the computer from the time already wasted whereas actually inefficiency from poor hardware is distributed throughout the day including productive periods. You would actually multiply a percentage of inefficiency x hours worked. Also honestly human beings doing intellectual work can't just do something else for 10 minutes and lose zero productivity because intellectual work is fundamentally dissimilar from assembling widgets OR managerial work. Consider reading http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html because you fundamentally don't understand how people work and can't be a good manager without at least attempting to understand.
  - lightedman 8y ago
    Read it, almost everything written applies mostly to the IT industry. It does NOT operate anywhere near like that in any warehouse, full-bore semiconductor manufacturing, or even fast food job I've ever had. What may apply to one person or industry absolutely does not apply to them all. And to boot - I'm the GM of a very, very large solar company.
  - dna_polymerase 8y ago
    > Also honestly human beings doing intellectual work can't just do something else for 10 minutes and lose zero productivity because intellectual work is fundamentally dissimilar from assembling widgets OR managerial work. Yup, I'm talking about the beginning of the work day. Nothing productive would be interrupted. > Consider reading http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html because you fundamentally don't understand how people work and can't be a good manager without at least attempting to understand. I have no idea how you got to your conclusions about me by reading my comment but thanks for judging. Regarding this piece by PG, did you read it? Because it actually supports my claim, to schedule a meeting in the beginning of the day, while machines would boot, in order to save the precious time in between start and beginning of the work day.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I agree with the first point: wasted time will quickly stack up with old/cheap tools. I don't buy your second argument about morale. The vast majority of professionals don't get to pick their tools, they are handed work and tools based on what is available and cost-effective. If these professionals' flexibility does not include programming on a 2 year old laptop vs a brand new one, wow, that's weak grit. If your employees' morale is destroyed by not working on the latest gadget, why is that, what else about the company is insufficient to degrade their morale so far?
- pseudalopex 8y ago
  The hit to morale comes from management dismissing a serious cost-benefit analysis with phrases like "weak grit" and "latest gadget".
  - eanzenberg 8y ago
    The literal difference between good and poor management. Being objective vs. subjective.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Do you make your employees only listen to one genre of music while working? Do you only allow specific food for lunch? Why do you just care about this specific point in how they work?
- jacobsenscott 8y ago
  As a professional I know what is cost effective for me better than anyone else. For example I know that I'm always bumping up against my 16 gig memory limit, but I have plenty of CPU. I know that I get less eye fatigue on a 4k monitor - so I picked a smaller 4k monitor that was cheaper than the monster lower resolution wrap around thing my colleague prefers. I know that I'll be significantly more cost effective with 32 gigs of ram because I don't need to spend time killing processes and rebooting VMs after half a day of work. I know what keyboard and mouse is still comfortable for me after working 8 hours, etc. I know I'll be more productive on a macbook not because I'm an apple fan boy. I hate apple because they've done more to kill open source than any other company - even MS. I'm a linux fan boy. But I need to use various tools that don't run on linux. I could "tough it out" on a cheaper windows machine, but it wouldn't be cost effective. I would be less productive. A professional knows what is cost effective and spends their hardware budget wisely to optimize their productivity. They don't rip off the company for the latest shiny gadget. It is stilly to trust a dev to essentially run a multi-million dollar company, but not to pick out a computer.
munk-a 8y ago
I think it's easy for a lot of people to criticize your mention of morale and many have, but the cost ratio of tools to labour is pretty extreme. Getting a new laptop every week is stupid but if your hardware is on the fritz your company should be willing to replace it pronto, having downtime without a machine while yours is in the shop is a reckless waste of company resources. My favorite example here is from an old CS job my wife had in connection with HP, this shop was such a grind house that they refused to buy a new chair that would be compatible with her back issues. Refusing to buy an employee a 120$ chair for a loss of perhaps 10-20% of their productivity just doesn't make sense mathematically - ditto for any company that has people working on computers that refuses to shell out for good keyboards and mice. These pieces of hardware are so cheap that having a lengthy discussion about why you're not going to get them is probably costing your company more money than just snapping them up.
- nikanj 8y ago
  HP somehow became the epitomy of crappy enterprise bean counting. They lost all the talent that had any options available, and the results are readily visible.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I do not bother to ask for new mice or keyboards any more. I just bring those myself.
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
i hate these kind of taylorist arguments. dev's limiting factor is always energy, not time. and i cannot imagine any good devs i know truly caring that they arent on the latest and greatest. i guess i just wouldn't work somewhere people care about that kind of shit, so maybe im biased.
- ShroudedNight 8y ago
  > dev's limiting factor is always energy, not time If this is true, I would expect that investing in hardware that most effectively gets out of a dev's way to have an even higher return on investment than is suggested by time and productivity arguments. The emotional toll of dealing with the dev equivalent of paper cuts should not be under-appreciated.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    As long as it doesn’t get in their way, I think the previous statement is indeed true. Devs don’t care whether their laptop is 2 years old or not, they care that their compilation takes 5 minutes when it could be 2.
rootlocus 8y ago
If you think developers churn out code at maximum productivity throughout the day and a 10m improvement in compile times per day will reap you benefits in a year, you're sorely mistaken. Unless that improvement lowers the compile time below a certain threshold where the dev will say "fuck it, I'll read some HN while it builds" you're probably not gaining anything.
- hrktb 8y ago
  I think there is more to it than pure compile time. It can affect responsiveness enough that it becomes disturbing. From there it can mean using fewer plugins, disabling part of the static code checks, doing less full debugging etc. I remember how activating the debugging flags wouldn’t work on some projects as the machine couldn’t handle it memory wise. All of these have a compounding effect that is non trivial.
- benj111 8y ago
  Ah but then that dev comes across an insightful article, that changes how they think about programming, and becomes a better programmer. What we should really be doing is spending all our time 'researching' on the internet. Increasing our value to our companies. That's what I tell my boss anyway.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  The original argument I read was that slowdowns or waits past a certain time affect mental flow. The flow is basically you being in the zone coding optimally. Interruptions like phones can jolt a person out of flow. So can long wait times. If person is in flow, you want them cranking out as much output as they can with no slowdowns. That was an advantage of Smalltalk and LISP. Any language with REPL or IDE supporting something like it will let one do this.
craigsmansion 8y ago
> 10 minutes of lost productivity a day and yet not every developer not using a tiling windowmanager is fired on the spot for wasting company time. "productivity" (or what people think of as productive activities) is overrated. Shiny new hardware makes employees, especially technically oriented ones, feel important and appreciated. That's about the gist of it. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not blow up egos with claims of "productivity".
- deleted 8y ago
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- sephoric 8y ago
  Productivity is one of those things that I think should be motivated with reward for increasing it instead of punishment for decreasing it. I love the nice feeling I get when I use my own custom window manager to shave another 3 seconds off a thing I commonly do. It's an amazing feeling, it makes me feel like Tony Stark, building my own personalized JARVIS, a program that automatically does exactly what I would have done manually. That's a big part of why I built my window manager and why I want to share it with people, because I want them to feel that same excitement and joy of directly improving your own quality of life, even in a tiny but very real way. I would open source it and give it away for free if I could do that and still keep the lights on.
  - jungler 8y ago
    My reaction to customizations that shave off seconds is: "so what, it'll be blown away the next time the tech stack changes." I do automate, but there's a subtle difference in goals. If I automate my personal toolset, I follow the same procedure I use around automation anywhere else: don't start off doing it to save time, do it to increase reliability. I will write small scripts, sometimes one-liner scripts, sometimes largish hundreds-of-lines scripts. But the outcome I am aiming for is that I have a procedure that is documented and puts all the configuration in a place where I can see it, so that when the situation changes, it is fixable. A productivity boost is a frequent byproduct of successfully automating, but it's usually a side component to "reliable and documented". The boost is perceived as reduced friction and increased conceptual integrity: fewer things to check or to accidentally get out of sync, and thus less stress involved. Focusing on UI being both shiny and fast is likewise often missing the point - which is the case when discussing new hardware. There are order-of-magnitude thresholds for human attention that are important to keep in mind, but hitting a lower attention threshold usually doesn't solve a productivity problem. It creates a case of "wrong solution faster", drawing the user into a fast but unplanned and reactive feedback loop. See for example the case of writers who like the Alphasmart, a device that makes doing editing so tedious that you don't do it, you just write the draft and edit later.
ori_b 8y ago
And yet, people insist on using heavy, slow development tools and SDKs, which make much more of an impact on productivity and iteration times than a 2 year difference in hardware.
4bpp 8y ago
I'm just never quite sure the gain in productivity and happy developers outweighs the cost of shipping a software product that requires hardware that costs 4-digit US$ figures to run smoothly (which seems to be the case for most everything produced by startups nowadays). I for my part would prefer if, for instance, the Slack developers were confined to machines on which their current product runs as badly as it does on mine, even if they feel so miserable and underappreciated as a consequence that their uplifting have-a-nice-day loading messages get replaced by passive-aggressive snark or something.
xupybd 8y ago
>10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequate hardware What on earth are you doing that a 2 year old mac is inadequate for? Yeah there is a point that the hardware is a problem. I'm working on a 5 year old, mid range PC and I don't think an upgrade would really change any of my day to day work. Maybe InjeliJ would be a little faster and compile times would be a fraction faster but I doubt I'd notice it. I have a 10 year old PC at home and the only pull to upgrade is gaming, but I'd rather not sink time into that (I get enough time sitting behind a screen at work) so I hold back on spending money on it too. Maybe the developers happiness does drop if you give them older hardware but I don't think that's based on realistic changes in performance of that hardware.
- jupp0r 8y ago
  > Maybe InjeliJ would be a little faster and compile times would be a fraction faster but I doubt I'd notice it. Just because you don't notice doesn't mean that it's not there. The argument is that it's insane to pay developers north of $100k per year + benefits and then don't invest $4k every 3 years to buy them fast hardware.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    No, the argument is that it's insane to pay developers north of $100k per year + benefits and then don't invest $4k every 3 years to buy them marginally faster hardware. And I don't think that argument is particularly convincing. Typing this from my 3.5 year old work MacBook Pro.
    - jupp0r 8y ago
      > marginally faster hardware Not sure where your experience is originated in. It obviously also depends on what exactly you do with your computer. Mid 2015 Macbook Pro to Mid 2018 Macbook Pro got a 50% improvement for compute workloads according to Geekbench [1]. I work on largish (win/mac/linux/ios/android) C++ code bases and compile and test run times are definitely an issue. Switching to newer computers every few years definitely boosted productivity for me personally (and for my co-workers as well). We mostly saw that compile times halved for each generation jump (3 years) as a combination of IO, memory and CPU performance increases. Not sure what marginally faster hardware means exactly for you, but for us it's definitely been significant, not marginal. YMMV, but if you do the math of saving 10 minutes / day * $200 /h * 200 days that's > $6000 per year it becomes pretty hard to economically argue against investing in faster tooling of some sort. Typing this from a 2.5yr old Macbook Pro. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
technofiend 8y ago
Plus opportunity cost when developers talk and the good guys decide between a job with servers or VMs in the cloud and a MacBook pro to use them or a shitty, out of date, slower than Christmas windows desktop rendered on a vdi appliance connected to a Citrix server in the next state. I mean... hypothetically, of course.

jseliger 8y ago

This conversation reminds me of that conversation from a day or two ago, when a writer argued that, if you're trying to hire senior engineers, you need to woo them, rather than expecting them to woo you. In high-end job markets, hardware is so cheap compared to salary, etc. that there is no reason not get the top stuff. If you don't, that may impinge productivity, and in addition it will send a very negative signal.

munk-a 8y ago
Honestly this doesn't just go for high-end jobs. If you're a coffee shop and refuse to shell out for some nice stools for employees to take a rest on then you're just not using math. All labour in the US costs far more than a decent chair or a nice ergonomic keyboard and mouse, a hands free headset... All of these things are peanuts compared to the costs of employing someone.
- grawprog 8y ago
  Yup. I really appreciate working a place where my employer understands this. Any tools, equipment, technicians we need to bring in...anything...we just say and we get it. The difference between this and my last job where we used equipment until it broke down...and then had to keep using it...where even a pair of earplugs seemed to be a source of stress...it's like night and day. I honestly don't think I could work for a company that cheaps out on equipment and supplies anymore. The difference it makes every day to the quality of not only the work I do, but the working conditions for me and the people I work with is worth it.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  I keep telling my employer this, and similar arguments, but no matter what, they still won't buy me one of these: https://www.mwelab.com/en/ https://www.mwelab.com/en/
  - fouc 8y ago
    Buy it yourself. "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness."
    - xupybd 8y ago
      I know we're not meant to say people didn't read the article. But did you click the link to the chair? I think it was a joke.
      - fouc 8y ago
        Yeah I clicked the link. I was also joking, saying he should buy it with his own funds, naturally the business wouldn't reimburse him :P
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    Why does that page require javascript to be enabled before you can see anything? ;(
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Ah, I’m sure that’s because it would be hard to fit in the office, not because of the price. It’s actually cheap enough that you could buy it yourself if you wanted to. It certainly went into my bookmarks, just in case I ever actually need a literal battlestation.
- achillesheels 8y ago
  I seriously think there are power games being played by employers who give their labor terrible working conditions when the marginal improvement would have such a tremendous morale boost. Perhaps out of worldly impotence, such an employer feels satisfied in seeing the toil of someone subservient.
Aeolun 8y ago
Basically anything is cheaper than salary. It’s why I don’t understand companies that do things like take away the free coffee to ‘save money’. If I can provide free coffee to the whole office on my own salary alone, maybe that’s not a great way to save money.
- around_here 8y ago
  super relevant: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

seanwilson 8y ago

> Usually it costs more than 10 minutes a day too. Anything that slows you down or irritates you eats up more minutes than just the raw time you're waiting too. Say something takes 1 second to compile vs 6 seconds on slower hardware and you're having to recompile ten times to fix a bug. The raw waiting time might only be 10 seconds vs 60 seconds but that extra pause of having to wait every time to see if you've fixed bug might annoy you enough to drain significantly more productivity out of you. You're best keeping your developers happy so they enjoy plowing through the work instead of hating it.

nikanj 8y ago
Once it takes more than 10 seconds, many people are likely to alt-tab to ”fun” - and often take quite a while to tab back
paublyrne 8y ago
You won't get a 6x performance improvement from replacing a two year old laptop. Laptop performance improvements have been tailing off for a while.
tasuki 8y ago
The OP mentioned a two year old computer. Do things compile 6 times slower than on today's computer? I'd guess at most 1/6th slower, ie 5/6ths of the time...
- seanwilson 8y ago
  It's a hypothetical example to illustrate the point that "anything that slows you down or irritates you eats up more minutes than just the raw time you're waiting". For the sake of a few thousand dollars for a laptop that can be used for several years, even a 1% increase in efficiency is very likely worth it.

scarface74 8y ago

If you are using Node as the original poster mentioned, what is a slightly faster computer doing for you? You’re not spending time waiting on a compiler.

sambroner 8y ago
What if you're using TypeScript, creating a few packages, and bundling them?
- jfrankamp 8y ago
  then you probably only need a 486 or so? programs can manipulate text quite effectively using ancient cpus.
  - marton78 8y ago
    Clearly you have never used TypeScript, created a few packages, and bundled them.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Sounds like better tools are in order. Golang produces results instantaneously for example.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Almost no present software will run acceptably on a 486 since machines orders of magnitude faster are available at walmart for $300 the question of what software would is mostly academic.
    - romeisendcoming 8y ago
      In 1999 we were 'upgrading' to Evergreen 586s in K12 for a lucky few boys and girls. Good times and a lot of nothing going on. PIO4 and PATA with PCI buses clocked at 33 MHZ. Can you imagine really trying to run 20+ year old tech in developer space? 8 - 10 MB/s throughput and 70 bogomips?

dna_polymerase 8y ago

> 10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequate hardware means you are paying at least $4k per year per dev for that shit pile of a laptop. This only holds true if your developers are 100% efficient programming every second the machine is running. But let's face it. The first hour of the day is most certainly not the most productive (10 minute boot? fine, I'll make coffee meanwhile). You could easily schedule a meeting, like a stand-up, while the machines fire up, if those 10 minutes really would be necessary.

jacobsenscott 8y ago
It is more like - this tests takes just long enough that I can jump over to hacker news for a few minutes...
michaelmrose 8y ago
Mathematically flawed there is no reason to suspect you can subtract the time spent waiting for the computer from the time already wasted whereas actually inefficiency from poor hardware is distributed throughout the day including productive periods. You would actually multiply a percentage of inefficiency x hours worked. Also honestly human beings doing intellectual work can't just do something else for 10 minutes and lose zero productivity because intellectual work is fundamentally dissimilar from assembling widgets OR managerial work. Consider reading http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html because you fundamentally don't understand how people work and can't be a good manager without at least attempting to understand.
- lightedman 8y ago
  Read it, almost everything written applies mostly to the IT industry. It does NOT operate anywhere near like that in any warehouse, full-bore semiconductor manufacturing, or even fast food job I've ever had. What may apply to one person or industry absolutely does not apply to them all. And to boot - I'm the GM of a very, very large solar company.
- dna_polymerase 8y ago
  > Also honestly human beings doing intellectual work can't just do something else for 10 minutes and lose zero productivity because intellectual work is fundamentally dissimilar from assembling widgets OR managerial work. Yup, I'm talking about the beginning of the work day. Nothing productive would be interrupted. > Consider reading http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html because you fundamentally don't understand how people work and can't be a good manager without at least attempting to understand. I have no idea how you got to your conclusions about me by reading my comment but thanks for judging. Regarding this piece by PG, did you read it? Because it actually supports my claim, to schedule a meeting in the beginning of the day, while machines would boot, in order to save the precious time in between start and beginning of the work day.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

I agree with the first point: wasted time will quickly stack up with old/cheap tools. I don't buy your second argument about morale. The vast majority of professionals don't get to pick their tools, they are handed work and tools based on what is available and cost-effective. If these professionals' flexibility does not include programming on a 2 year old laptop vs a brand new one, wow, that's weak grit. If your employees' morale is destroyed by not working on the latest gadget, why is that, what else about the company is insufficient to degrade their morale so far?

pseudalopex 8y ago
The hit to morale comes from management dismissing a serious cost-benefit analysis with phrases like "weak grit" and "latest gadget".
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  The literal difference between good and poor management. Being objective vs. subjective.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
Do you make your employees only listen to one genre of music while working? Do you only allow specific food for lunch? Why do you just care about this specific point in how they work?
jacobsenscott 8y ago
As a professional I know what is cost effective for me better than anyone else. For example I know that I'm always bumping up against my 16 gig memory limit, but I have plenty of CPU. I know that I get less eye fatigue on a 4k monitor - so I picked a smaller 4k monitor that was cheaper than the monster lower resolution wrap around thing my colleague prefers. I know that I'll be significantly more cost effective with 32 gigs of ram because I don't need to spend time killing processes and rebooting VMs after half a day of work. I know what keyboard and mouse is still comfortable for me after working 8 hours, etc. I know I'll be more productive on a macbook not because I'm an apple fan boy. I hate apple because they've done more to kill open source than any other company - even MS. I'm a linux fan boy. But I need to use various tools that don't run on linux. I could "tough it out" on a cheaper windows machine, but it wouldn't be cost effective. I would be less productive. A professional knows what is cost effective and spends their hardware budget wisely to optimize their productivity. They don't rip off the company for the latest shiny gadget. It is stilly to trust a dev to essentially run a multi-million dollar company, but not to pick out a computer.

munk-a 8y ago

I think it's easy for a lot of people to criticize your mention of morale and many have, but the cost ratio of tools to labour is pretty extreme. Getting a new laptop every week is stupid but if your hardware is on the fritz your company should be willing to replace it pronto, having downtime without a machine while yours is in the shop is a reckless waste of company resources. My favorite example here is from an old CS job my wife had in connection with HP, this shop was such a grind house that they refused to buy a new chair that would be compatible with her back issues. Refusing to buy an employee a 120$ chair for a loss of perhaps 10-20% of their productivity just doesn't make sense mathematically - ditto for any company that has people working on computers that refuses to shell out for good keyboards and mice. These pieces of hardware are so cheap that having a lengthy discussion about why you're not going to get them is probably costing your company more money than just snapping them up.

nikanj 8y ago
HP somehow became the epitomy of crappy enterprise bean counting. They lost all the talent that had any options available, and the results are readily visible.
Aeolun 8y ago
I do not bother to ask for new mice or keyboards any more. I just bring those myself.

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

i hate these kind of taylorist arguments. dev's limiting factor is always energy, not time. and i cannot imagine any good devs i know truly caring that they arent on the latest and greatest. i guess i just wouldn't work somewhere people care about that kind of shit, so maybe im biased.

ShroudedNight 8y ago
> dev's limiting factor is always energy, not time If this is true, I would expect that investing in hardware that most effectively gets out of a dev's way to have an even higher return on investment than is suggested by time and productivity arguments. The emotional toll of dealing with the dev equivalent of paper cuts should not be under-appreciated.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  As long as it doesn’t get in their way, I think the previous statement is indeed true. Devs don’t care whether their laptop is 2 years old or not, they care that their compilation takes 5 minutes when it could be 2.

rootlocus 8y ago

If you think developers churn out code at maximum productivity throughout the day and a 10m improvement in compile times per day will reap you benefits in a year, you're sorely mistaken. Unless that improvement lowers the compile time below a certain threshold where the dev will say "fuck it, I'll read some HN while it builds" you're probably not gaining anything.

hrktb 8y ago
I think there is more to it than pure compile time. It can affect responsiveness enough that it becomes disturbing. From there it can mean using fewer plugins, disabling part of the static code checks, doing less full debugging etc. I remember how activating the debugging flags wouldn’t work on some projects as the machine couldn’t handle it memory wise. All of these have a compounding effect that is non trivial.
benj111 8y ago
Ah but then that dev comes across an insightful article, that changes how they think about programming, and becomes a better programmer. What we should really be doing is spending all our time 'researching' on the internet. Increasing our value to our companies. That's what I tell my boss anyway.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
The original argument I read was that slowdowns or waits past a certain time affect mental flow. The flow is basically you being in the zone coding optimally. Interruptions like phones can jolt a person out of flow. So can long wait times. If person is in flow, you want them cranking out as much output as they can with no slowdowns. That was an advantage of Smalltalk and LISP. Any language with REPL or IDE supporting something like it will let one do this.

craigsmansion 8y ago

> 10 minutes of lost productivity a day and yet not every developer not using a tiling windowmanager is fired on the spot for wasting company time. "productivity" (or what people think of as productive activities) is overrated. Shiny new hardware makes employees, especially technically oriented ones, feel important and appreciated. That's about the gist of it. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not blow up egos with claims of "productivity".

deleted 8y ago
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sephoric 8y ago
Productivity is one of those things that I think should be motivated with reward for increasing it instead of punishment for decreasing it. I love the nice feeling I get when I use my own custom window manager to shave another 3 seconds off a thing I commonly do. It's an amazing feeling, it makes me feel like Tony Stark, building my own personalized JARVIS, a program that automatically does exactly what I would have done manually. That's a big part of why I built my window manager and why I want to share it with people, because I want them to feel that same excitement and joy of directly improving your own quality of life, even in a tiny but very real way. I would open source it and give it away for free if I could do that and still keep the lights on.
- jungler 8y ago
  My reaction to customizations that shave off seconds is: "so what, it'll be blown away the next time the tech stack changes." I do automate, but there's a subtle difference in goals. If I automate my personal toolset, I follow the same procedure I use around automation anywhere else: don't start off doing it to save time, do it to increase reliability. I will write small scripts, sometimes one-liner scripts, sometimes largish hundreds-of-lines scripts. But the outcome I am aiming for is that I have a procedure that is documented and puts all the configuration in a place where I can see it, so that when the situation changes, it is fixable. A productivity boost is a frequent byproduct of successfully automating, but it's usually a side component to "reliable and documented". The boost is perceived as reduced friction and increased conceptual integrity: fewer things to check or to accidentally get out of sync, and thus less stress involved. Focusing on UI being both shiny and fast is likewise often missing the point - which is the case when discussing new hardware. There are order-of-magnitude thresholds for human attention that are important to keep in mind, but hitting a lower attention threshold usually doesn't solve a productivity problem. It creates a case of "wrong solution faster", drawing the user into a fast but unplanned and reactive feedback loop. See for example the case of writers who like the Alphasmart, a device that makes doing editing so tedious that you don't do it, you just write the draft and edit later.

ori_b 8y ago

And yet, people insist on using heavy, slow development tools and SDKs, which make much more of an impact on productivity and iteration times than a 2 year difference in hardware.

4bpp 8y ago

I'm just never quite sure the gain in productivity and happy developers outweighs the cost of shipping a software product that requires hardware that costs 4-digit US$ figures to run smoothly (which seems to be the case for most everything produced by startups nowadays). I for my part would prefer if, for instance, the Slack developers were confined to machines on which their current product runs as badly as it does on mine, even if they feel so miserable and underappreciated as a consequence that their uplifting have-a-nice-day loading messages get replaced by passive-aggressive snark or something.

xupybd 8y ago

>10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequate hardware What on earth are you doing that a 2 year old mac is inadequate for? Yeah there is a point that the hardware is a problem. I'm working on a 5 year old, mid range PC and I don't think an upgrade would really change any of my day to day work. Maybe InjeliJ would be a little faster and compile times would be a fraction faster but I doubt I'd notice it. I have a 10 year old PC at home and the only pull to upgrade is gaming, but I'd rather not sink time into that (I get enough time sitting behind a screen at work) so I hold back on spending money on it too. Maybe the developers happiness does drop if you give them older hardware but I don't think that's based on realistic changes in performance of that hardware.

jupp0r 8y ago
> Maybe InjeliJ would be a little faster and compile times would be a fraction faster but I doubt I'd notice it. Just because you don't notice doesn't mean that it's not there. The argument is that it's insane to pay developers north of $100k per year + benefits and then don't invest $4k every 3 years to buy them fast hardware.
- weberc2 8y ago
  No, the argument is that it's insane to pay developers north of $100k per year + benefits and then don't invest $4k every 3 years to buy them marginally faster hardware. And I don't think that argument is particularly convincing. Typing this from my 3.5 year old work MacBook Pro.
  - jupp0r 8y ago
    > marginally faster hardware Not sure where your experience is originated in. It obviously also depends on what exactly you do with your computer. Mid 2015 Macbook Pro to Mid 2018 Macbook Pro got a 50% improvement for compute workloads according to Geekbench [1]. I work on largish (win/mac/linux/ios/android) C++ code bases and compile and test run times are definitely an issue. Switching to newer computers every few years definitely boosted productivity for me personally (and for my co-workers as well). We mostly saw that compile times halved for each generation jump (3 years) as a combination of IO, memory and CPU performance increases. Not sure what marginally faster hardware means exactly for you, but for us it's definitely been significant, not marginal. YMMV, but if you do the math of saving 10 minutes / day * $200 /h * 200 days that's > $6000 per year it becomes pretty hard to economically argue against investing in faster tooling of some sort. Typing this from a 2.5yr old Macbook Pro. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

technofiend 8y ago

Plus opportunity cost when developers talk and the good guys decide between a job with servers or VMs in the cloud and a MacBook pro to use them or a shitty, out of date, slower than Christmas windows desktop rendered on a vdi appliance connected to a Citrix server in the next state. I mean... hypothetically, of course.