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I worked for a company a few years back, for a short time, who bought engineers crappy Lenovo consumer laptops with a halfassed installation of Linux Mint and a

by aejnsn 6y ago

I worked for a company a few years back, for a short time, who bought engineers crappy Lenovo consumer laptops with a halfassed installation of Linux Mint and a resolution of 1368x768. They would not invest in appropriate processes/tools to run an agile development shop, but wanted to brag to investors and clients about all the usual buzzwords. Engineers spent forever shelling through machines to find logs in staging, production APM was half-implemented. Everything was a poorly-implemented open source project with no contributions upstream. The teams other than my greenfield team were mostly self-taught, previous college interns. I say all of that to say this. Allow your engineers to save you money. The bean-counters frequently in finance/accounting working the balance sheet don’t know the first thing about saving money where it actually matters. Everything that company did was mired in technical debt and took easily 3x the time it should have taken with proper tools, processes, and staffing. It frequently cost them productivity towards reasonable deadlines all the time.

segmondy 6y ago
Back in the day, I had an online friend in Poland, that was a much better programmer and consistently wrote faster programs than me. When I started looking into it, I found out he had an 8086 so was forced to optimize, but I had a 386 and took it for granted. So whenever I ran his programs they were very fast. Sometimes constraints are a good thing. I believe part of the issue we see today in say web or mobile app dev is that most developers have much nicer gear than their average consumer. They end up building things that run very nice locally but like shit across network or with slower hardware.
- ystad 6y ago
  That is very true. Engineers at bigger/richer companies typically have better hardware to program with, desktop and mobile apps built by them usually drag on slower hardware. This forces users to upgrade. Seems like a racket :)
jimnotgym 6y ago
Just because the bean counters in that business didn't know how to save money doesn't mean that is true of all bean counters. Good bean counters want you to justify the purchases you make, but will refuse to choose them for you.

by aejnsn 6y ago

segmondy 6y ago

Back in the day, I had an online friend in Poland, that was a much better programmer and consistently wrote faster programs than me. When I started looking into it, I found out he had an 8086 so was forced to optimize, but I had a 386 and took it for granted. So whenever I ran his programs they were very fast. Sometimes constraints are a good thing. I believe part of the issue we see today in say web or mobile app dev is that most developers have much nicer gear than their average consumer. They end up building things that run very nice locally but like shit across network or with slower hardware.

ystad 6y ago
That is very true. Engineers at bigger/richer companies typically have better hardware to program with, desktop and mobile apps built by them usually drag on slower hardware. This forces users to upgrade. Seems like a racket :)

jimnotgym 6y ago

Just because the bean counters in that business didn't know how to save money doesn't mean that is true of all bean counters. Good bean counters want you to justify the purchases you make, but will refuse to choose them for you.