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I only had this issue the one time while I was an employee: I wanted a Thinkpad, but management insisted I got a shitty Dell. In the end, they got me a Thinkpad
by elric 3y ago
I only had this issue the one time while I was an employee: I wanted a Thinkpad, but management insisted I got a shitty Dell. In the end, they got me a Thinkpad.
Other than that, whenever I've asked for a book or some tool, I simply got it, even expensive split keyboards.
Now that I'm self employed, I just buy what I need. Which isn't much, really. Very few "developer tools" are useful enough to spend money on, let alone try to integrate them in my workflow. That last part has become much more important to me over the years.
- chillfox 3y agoIf you have to ask, then you don’t have authority.
- samus 3y agoIf you get what you ask for without fuss, then it's not an issue. It becomes an issue if you have to slog your way through corporate bureaucracy^H^Hzy to get basic things.
- maccard 3y agoAnd asking isn't a problem - it stops three different teams signing up for slack, campfire, teams.
- moooo99 3y agoIt depends on how strictly the request is scrutinized. I can spend exactly 0€ myself. But when I request a new machine, the order is placed immediately. On the other hand I requested three months access to frontend masters which was promptly denied citing I should use our Udemy subscription.
- maccard 3y agoYou can have authority while still having someone be accountable to the org. We had a situation where we were paying for three different presentation tools and two whiteboarding tools for a team of 30 people because two people had minor preferences. I have to request a limited card for recurring spends, which comes with a "why" box. It makes people think about what they're buying just a tiny bit more. But I've never had a single purchase denied (other than the time I accidentally paid for a personal holiday on my work card because Google pay's default payment card on device and online are linked)
- grumpy_coder 3y agoGenerally, nobody has authority. Even the highest executive has to fight procurement in a big corp. Own a VC-backed startup, the investors want you to get prior agreement on 'large' purchases. Maybe if you are the sole owner of a small firm without a purchasing department. Politics always has people insert themselves in the flow of money.
- cjk2 3y agoCorporate life... I got a shitty Dell. It broke. I got another shitty Dell. That broke. I got another shitty Dell. That broke. I got a shitty Dell. BUT WE ONLY HAVE A CONTRACT WITH DELL. Perhaps you shouldn't have a contract with Dell? Silence. Then the brain gets going. You realise the best bits of your life are when the Dell breaks because it takes 5 days for them to work out how to send a new one out through the layers of PO and ordering politics which are responsible for the account with Dell in the first place. That is 5 days of bliss where you can't do ANYTHING because of the vicious corporate security policy so you sleep for 5 days, catch up on friends, be a human again. I love Dell. I don't want a ThinkPad. But I own a MacBook for my own use.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago[dead]
- sys_64738 3y agoCompanies like Dell hit every market segment from 150$ crap laptops through 4 hour on-site service support. It's all down to the support contract your organization has and which product segment they're buying from.
- initplus 3y agoAnecdata yada yada, but both colleagues of mine with a Dell XPS had trouble with them. This is Dell's top of the line productivity laptop segment. Yeah we got top of the line service. But the damn things still broke down in the first place. Critically, I recall one of them blue screened in the middle of some important infra changes and triggered an outage...
- cjk2 3y agoSame story with Precision and XPS. $3k laptops last 9 months if you're lucky. I literally have a pile of dead ones now. They don't even bother with servicing them.
- 3y ago