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> My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they

by api 6y ago

> My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company. This is what happens when you're run by bean counters who don't understand your core business or industry.

joshstrange 6y ago
In the same/similar vein it never ceases to amaze me how employers don't provide their employees with the best tools possible (within reason) to do their jobs. A company will give a developer a low/mid-range laptop/desktop pinching every penny they can then turn around any pay them a huge salary... Like do they not understand that running into RAM/CPU limits makes the developer less effective? I've had jobs where I've easily spent 10x the cost of the better components/computer in time waiting on company-issued computer. Very penny wise and pound foolish. EDIT: Two stories that still annoy me to this day: 1. We had been complaining about our slow machines for a while and my PM told me to write up a proposal to send to his boss for new parts. Which, side note, was the last time I went out of my way to /beg/ for equipment to do my job better. Anyway, I write up an email with the reasoning for why we needed new hard drives (SSD's, we were still on spinning rust) and/or more RAM (I think we had ~16GB but we were running VMs). I explained how each part would help and even found cheap versions of both online that would be sufficient for our needs (we are talking <$1-2K total for all of it for the whole team of 4). I specifically said that if it had to come down to one or the other that the SSD would help more than the RAM (and it was cheaper). I never got a reply to the request and then a few weeks later we got new RAM... Like why even pay people with the knowledge/skills if you aren't even going to listen to them or even engage/discuss it. 2. The company was going to buy the developers new machines (finally) and they were testing out various machines (with hardly any input from the developers). All of the developers (4, this wasn't a huge company) had personal Macs they used for meetings/WFH (we only had desktops from work) but the company refused to even consider buying Macs because someone up the chain had a vendetta against Macs. They were looking at crappy laptops that cost the same or more than the MBP's we all wanted but it a complete no-go. This was also the company where I used my personal MBP for work (with begrudging approval) because it was way better than the Dell desktop they gave me (to run Linux on). What made it infuriating was we did cross-platform development (iOS/Android) but I was the only team member who could build/test the iOS builds because I had a Mac. The company provided an old cheese grater Mac Pro (pre-trashcan) that couldn't even be updated to a new enough OS to build apps that could be submitted to Apple...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- treeman79 6y ago
  Mine gave me a top of the line MacBook Pro, fully loaded. Then loaded so much security crap on it that all cores are maxed out without me even touching machine. Base vim nearly unusable. Then they made it so I could only access things via a double Remote Desktop tunnel. Basically an expensive space heater. 3 months of nothing done until security software suffered an unfortunate accident.
  - DelightOne 6y ago
    > suffered an unfortunate accident scheduled or unscheduled?
    - treeman79 6y ago
      I actually had a loop in background that would kill -9 various services every few seconds until I finally got them all uninstalled.
      - mixmastamyk 6y ago
        If you can kill -9 it sounds like it could have been uninstalled?
        a1369209993 6y ago
        You need to kill -9 the denial-of-service-causing services so you can actually interact with the system in order to delete them. (I used to have to do this with organizational Windows machines before I realized I could boot off a livecd and either rm -rf them, or just install a real operating system; I assume OSX/MBP is similar.)
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      If I select "unscheduled" will I have to fill a survey before I can reboot the machine?
georgeburdell 6y ago
Companies will pay whatever they think they can get away with. Some companies with high social cachet like Tesla pay quite poorly [1], and yet people want to work there. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Tesla,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer# https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Tesla,Google,Facebook,Micros...

by api 6y ago

joshstrange 6y ago

In the same/similar vein it never ceases to amaze me how employers don't provide their employees with the best tools possible (within reason) to do their jobs. A company will give a developer a low/mid-range laptop/desktop pinching every penny they can then turn around any pay them a huge salary... Like do they not understand that running into RAM/CPU limits makes the developer less effective? I've had jobs where I've easily spent 10x the cost of the better components/computer in time waiting on company-issued computer. Very penny wise and pound foolish. EDIT: Two stories that still annoy me to this day: 1. We had been complaining about our slow machines for a while and my PM told me to write up a proposal to send to his boss for new parts. Which, side note, was the last time I went out of my way to /beg/ for equipment to do my job better. Anyway, I write up an email with the reasoning for why we needed new hard drives (SSD's, we were still on spinning rust) and/or more RAM (I think we had ~16GB but we were running VMs). I explained how each part would help and even found cheap versions of both online that would be sufficient for our needs (we are talking <$1-2K total for all of it for the whole team of 4). I specifically said that if it had to come down to one or the other that the SSD would help more than the RAM (and it was cheaper). I never got a reply to the request and then a few weeks later we got new RAM... Like why even pay people with the knowledge/skills if you aren't even going to listen to them or even engage/discuss it. 2. The company was going to buy the developers new machines (finally) and they were testing out various machines (with hardly any input from the developers). All of the developers (4, this wasn't a huge company) had personal Macs they used for meetings/WFH (we only had desktops from work) but the company refused to even consider buying Macs because someone up the chain had a vendetta against Macs. They were looking at crappy laptops that cost the same or more than the MBP's we all wanted but it a complete no-go. This was also the company where I used my personal MBP for work (with begrudging approval) because it was way better than the Dell desktop they gave me (to run Linux on). What made it infuriating was we did cross-platform development (iOS/Android) but I was the only team member who could build/test the iOS builds because I had a Mac. The company provided an old cheese grater Mac Pro (pre-trashcan) that couldn't even be updated to a new enough OS to build apps that could be submitted to Apple...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
treeman79 6y ago
Mine gave me a top of the line MacBook Pro, fully loaded. Then loaded so much security crap on it that all cores are maxed out without me even touching machine. Base vim nearly unusable. Then they made it so I could only access things via a double Remote Desktop tunnel. Basically an expensive space heater. 3 months of nothing done until security software suffered an unfortunate accident.
- DelightOne 6y ago
  > suffered an unfortunate accident scheduled or unscheduled?
  - treeman79 6y ago
    I actually had a loop in background that would kill -9 various services every few seconds until I finally got them all uninstalled.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      If you can kill -9 it sounds like it could have been uninstalled?
      - a1369209993 6y ago
        You need to kill -9 the denial-of-service-causing services so you can actually interact with the system in order to delete them. (I used to have to do this with organizational Windows machines before I realized I could boot off a livecd and either rm -rf them, or just install a real operating system; I assume OSX/MBP is similar.)
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    If I select "unscheduled" will I have to fill a survey before I can reboot the machine?

georgeburdell 6y ago

Companies will pay whatever they think they can get away with. Some companies with high social cachet like Tesla pay quite poorly [1], and yet people want to work there. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Tesla,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer# https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Tesla,Google,Facebook,Micros...