6 ms·

So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another? In my book what Microsoft

So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another? In my book what Microsoft does is waaaaay beyond "trying to save on toilet paper". The last place I worked having a monitor bigger than 19" was a status simbol. Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right? Because I have noticed that juniors tend to have this petty fascination with hardware that goes away with time (myself included).

plinkplonk 16y ago
"what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?" I work on a 3000 node super computing cluster doing heavy duty Machine Learning and signal processing and a lot of funky (and classified) hardware, and yes, no one would blink if I wanted two more machines (or a 100 more) - as a matter of fact we recently did a million$ + upgrade of the hardware on my say so, so yeah everyone on this project gets all the hardware they want ;-) Looking around I see (my personal system, doing mostly rendering and reports) 7 quad core machines, three 27 in monitors, 2 laptops, both Thinkpads. I (literally) only have to ask to get more machines. "Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right?" Patronizing is always inexcusable and rude, and snark appropriate on reddit isnot so valued on HN, but I don't mind at all. When you say things like that you just make a fool of yourself in public, go right ahead. :-) And as for my age, I am closer to 40 than 25, so perhaps you just need to try again? ;-) EDIT: (btw "paper towels" != "toilet paper". You missed the reference This which wrt the benefits cuts in 2004which included stopping towel supply(later rescinded) - I confess I am only guessing the towels were paper. ;-) from mini msft (I heard from a friend in MS, but mini is an online reference) "Should have just done the towels and called it a day!" - Lisa Brummel, May 18th 2006. You know, one moment of reflection: the circle is now complete. My second post to this blog was on July 6th, 2004. It was right after an impromptu employee meeting with Ballmer and Gates and as part of that, Mr. Ballmer justified the unfortunate recent benefit cuts, the main two points of ire being the towels and the ESPP revamp. Now, two years later, we're getting our towels back. Has it always just been about the towels? (Possible book title flashes through my mind.) It's not like we're sweaty work-out animals always in need of a shower and fresh towel. No. What riled us was the bone-headed way the towel cut-back was handled, explained, and justified. It truly made us wonder just who are these people in charge and just who do they think they are leading? The towels became the symbol of poor leadership. That and the office-supply hide-and-seek. Someone should send Ms. Brummel a golden towel award. I'd like my old ESPP back, too."
- kenjackson 16y ago
  That sounds very cost ineffective. I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot... but the productivity benefit is probably not worth the cost. All organizations need to be cost efficient... unless you're a govt agency or contractor. In which case being cost INefficient is actually rational.
  - plinkplonk 16y ago
    "That sounds very cost ineffective." What specifically sounds "cost ineffective"? 3000 node clusters? That is a tiny cluster as clusters go. 7 quad core machines? Two ThinkPads? A million dollars on one-of-a-kind hardware? You my friend, have zero clue in this. Since you have no idea what the specific cost benefit analysis on this project is that statement is built on nothing but your prejudices. I grant that it may "sound" ineffective to someone with no experience working on such projects. If I were to blather about whether a drug development proposal (something about which I know next to nothing) is "cost effective" without even looking at the financial documentation, I'd come close to what you are doing with that statement. "I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot" In the right situation, expensing a personal helicopter would be trivial. What is "cost effective" depends on the derived benefit. Applies to startups too. The cost depends on the benefit derived not on what the raw materials cost. So (fwiw, I could care less about convincing you) It is not really "cost ineffective". Machine/networking etc costs on this project are trivial compared to the total budget (spent on other resources) and (much) more importantly the derived benefit. (just making up an example since I can't talk about what this project really does) If you were able to decrypt, and classify (in the Machine Learning sense) all enemy communication in real time, how much is that capability worth to a nation? Worth spending a few millions on? Not every project in the world has the financial structure of two guys in a garage coding up the next silly web app. Iow you are talking about "unknown unknowns" with nothing to back up your conclusions. Amusing but not really relevant.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
nostrademons 16y ago
My personal setup is 3 24" monitors, 2 quad-core desktops, and a ThinkPad laptop, backed up by a few tens of thousands of machines sitting off in a datacenter somewhere. With what they're paying me, they could afford my total hardware setup with less than a month of salary, and it's saved me far more time than that. I use basically all of it - all 3 monitors are usually covered with windows, and it's not unusual to have 4-6 webservers running on my desktops. I'm older than 25, though probably not as old as plinkplonk.
- jdp23 16y ago
  Exactly. Unless a company's in such bad shape that they have to nickel-and-dime on expenses, the value of productive (and happy!) employees far outweighs hardware costs.
  - JanezStupar 16y ago
    See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here. But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost centers and cost centers need to be minimized to gain profit. It's what you get when you let the beancounters run the business. But people bitching here that developers at MS don't have it well off - are being ignorant about majority of industry where developers are still being under-utilized to everyones dismay. And Microsoft's care of intellectual workers is top tier. Even the ones that are not well off (sitting in a room with 10 other people) are better off than 90% of our industry. Indeed some people get to have anything they want or need - good for them. Even better if it makes the end result better. It's good that they don't get into situation as I have in multiple occasions - running a top priority, code red development effort which if fails it will take the company down, and then when I needed a new virtual appliance I got informed that I cannot get is since the ESX is out of harddrives and that there will be no purchases since the budged has already been spent. And this is the industry standard - not the "I run bazillion node supercluster". Hell where I used to work - two of the interns went and bought 2 24" monitors each out of their own money to use them at work.

plinkplonk 16y ago

"what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?" I work on a 3000 node super computing cluster doing heavy duty Machine Learning and signal processing and a lot of funky (and classified) hardware, and yes, no one would blink if I wanted two more machines (or a 100 more) - as a matter of fact we recently did a million$ + upgrade of the hardware on my say so, so yeah everyone on this project gets all the hardware they want ;-) Looking around I see (my personal system, doing mostly rendering and reports) 7 quad core machines, three 27 in monitors, 2 laptops, both Thinkpads. I (literally) only have to ask to get more machines. "Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right?" Patronizing is always inexcusable and rude, and snark appropriate on reddit isnot so valued on HN, but I don't mind at all. When you say things like that you just make a fool of yourself in public, go right ahead. :-) And as for my age, I am closer to 40 than 25, so perhaps you just need to try again? ;-) EDIT: (btw "paper towels" != "toilet paper". You missed the reference This which wrt the benefits cuts in 2004which included stopping towel supply(later rescinded) - I confess I am only guessing the towels were paper. ;-) from mini msft (I heard from a friend in MS, but mini is an online reference) "Should have just done the towels and called it a day!" - Lisa Brummel, May 18th 2006. You know, one moment of reflection: the circle is now complete. My second post to this blog was on July 6th, 2004. It was right after an impromptu employee meeting with Ballmer and Gates and as part of that, Mr. Ballmer justified the unfortunate recent benefit cuts, the main two points of ire being the towels and the ESPP revamp. Now, two years later, we're getting our towels back. Has it always just been about the towels? (Possible book title flashes through my mind.) It's not like we're sweaty work-out animals always in need of a shower and fresh towel. No. What riled us was the bone-headed way the towel cut-back was handled, explained, and justified. It truly made us wonder just who are these people in charge and just who do they think they are leading? The towels became the symbol of poor leadership. That and the office-supply hide-and-seek. Someone should send Ms. Brummel a golden towel award. I'd like my old ESPP back, too."

kenjackson 16y ago
That sounds very cost ineffective. I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot... but the productivity benefit is probably not worth the cost. All organizations need to be cost efficient... unless you're a govt agency or contractor. In which case being cost INefficient is actually rational.
- plinkplonk 16y ago
  "That sounds very cost ineffective." What specifically sounds "cost ineffective"? 3000 node clusters? That is a tiny cluster as clusters go. 7 quad core machines? Two ThinkPads? A million dollars on one-of-a-kind hardware? You my friend, have zero clue in this. Since you have no idea what the specific cost benefit analysis on this project is that statement is built on nothing but your prejudices. I grant that it may "sound" ineffective to someone with no experience working on such projects. If I were to blather about whether a drug development proposal (something about which I know next to nothing) is "cost effective" without even looking at the financial documentation, I'd come close to what you are doing with that statement. "I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot" In the right situation, expensing a personal helicopter would be trivial. What is "cost effective" depends on the derived benefit. Applies to startups too. The cost depends on the benefit derived not on what the raw materials cost. So (fwiw, I could care less about convincing you) It is not really "cost ineffective". Machine/networking etc costs on this project are trivial compared to the total budget (spent on other resources) and (much) more importantly the derived benefit. (just making up an example since I can't talk about what this project really does) If you were able to decrypt, and classify (in the Machine Learning sense) all enemy communication in real time, how much is that capability worth to a nation? Worth spending a few millions on? Not every project in the world has the financial structure of two guys in a garage coding up the next silly web app. Iow you are talking about "unknown unknowns" with nothing to back up your conclusions. Amusing but not really relevant.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

nostrademons 16y ago

My personal setup is 3 24" monitors, 2 quad-core desktops, and a ThinkPad laptop, backed up by a few tens of thousands of machines sitting off in a datacenter somewhere. With what they're paying me, they could afford my total hardware setup with less than a month of salary, and it's saved me far more time than that. I use basically all of it - all 3 monitors are usually covered with windows, and it's not unusual to have 4-6 webservers running on my desktops. I'm older than 25, though probably not as old as plinkplonk.

jdp23 16y ago
Exactly. Unless a company's in such bad shape that they have to nickel-and-dime on expenses, the value of productive (and happy!) employees far outweighs hardware costs.
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here. But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost centers and cost centers need to be minimized to gain profit. It's what you get when you let the beancounters run the business. But people bitching here that developers at MS don't have it well off - are being ignorant about majority of industry where developers are still being under-utilized to everyones dismay. And Microsoft's care of intellectual workers is top tier. Even the ones that are not well off (sitting in a room with 10 other people) are better off than 90% of our industry. Indeed some people get to have anything they want or need - good for them. Even better if it makes the end result better. It's good that they don't get into situation as I have in multiple occasions - running a top priority, code red development effort which if fails it will take the company down, and then when I needed a new virtual appliance I got informed that I cannot get is since the ESX is out of harddrives and that there will be no purchases since the budged has already been spent. And this is the industry standard - not the "I run bazillion node supercluster". Hell where I used to work - two of the interns went and bought 2 24" monitors each out of their own money to use them at work.