14 ms·

Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware. Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putt

• tgma 1y ago
  FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself." Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers. Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need. Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.
  • laidoffamazon 1y ago
    How do you know someone worked at Google? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you
  • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    Not sure what you are talking about re amzn. I have a pretty high end MacBook Pro, and that pales in comparison to the compute I have access to.
    • tgma 1y ago
      The OP was talking beyond just compute hardware. Stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1jusbj2/amazons_frugality_isnt_efficientits_dystopian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1jusbj2/amazon...
      • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
        That’s fair criticism. I only corrected the hardware aspect of it all.
      • sincerely 1y ago
        All of OPs posts in that thread are blatantly Chat GPT output
        • gruez 1y ago
          Because.. em-dashes? As many others have mentioned, ios/mac have auto em-dashes so it's not really a reliable indicator.
          • brookst 1y ago
            It’s so annoying that we’ve lost a legit and useful typographic convention just because some people think that AI overusing it means that all uses indicate AI. Sure, I’ve stopped using em-dashes just to avoid the hassle of trying to educate people about a basic logical fallacy, but I reserve the right to be salty about it.
• createaccount99 1y ago
  Isn't it about equal treatment? You can't buy one person everything they want, just because they have high salary, otherwise the employee next door will get salty.
  • loeg 1y ago
    I don't think so. I think mostly just keeping spend down in aggregate.
  • hamdingers 1y ago
    I previously worked at a company where everyone got a budget of ~$2000. The only requirement was you had to get a mac (to make it easier on IT I assume), the rest was up to you. Some people bought a $2000 macbook pro, some bought a $600 mac mini and used the rest on displays and other peripherals. Equality doesn't have to mean uniformity.
    • bobmcnamara 1y ago
      I've often wondered how a personal company budget would work for electrical engineers. At one place I had a $25 no question spending limit, but sank a few months trying to buy a $5k piece of test equipment because somebody thought maybe some other tool could be repurposed to work, or we used to have one of those but it's so old the bandwidth isn't useful now, or this project is really for some other cost center and I don't work for that cost center. Turns out I get paid the same either way.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      I saw this tried ones and it didn’t work. Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things. So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.
      • hamdingers 1y ago
• loeg 1y ago
  I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.
  • corimaith 1y ago
    The cost of a good office chair is comparable to a top tier gaming pc, if not higher.
    • loeg 1y ago
      Are there any FANG employers unwilling to provide good office chairs? I think even cheap employers offer these.
      • thenewwazoo 1y ago
        There are many that won’t even assign desks, much less provide decent chairs. Amazon and LinkedIn are two examples I know from personal experience.
      • Aeolun 1y ago
        I think my employer hed a contest to see which of 4 office chairs people liked the most, then they bought the one that everyone hated. I’m not quite sure anymore what kind of reason was given.
    • kec 1y ago
      Not for an enterprise buying (or renting) furniture in bulk it isn’t. The chair will also easily last a decade and be turned over to the next employee if this one leaves… unlike computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months even if your dev sticks around anyway.
      • varjag 1y ago
• Aurornis 1y ago
  Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it. Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come. > There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs, You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures. Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached. There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
  • master_crab 1y ago
    There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal. Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      > the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to. This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies. It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work. Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.
• forgotusername6 1y ago
  Just to do web development? I regularly go into swap running everything I need on my laptop. Ideally I'd have VScode, webpack, and jest running continuously. I'd also occasionally need playwright. That's all before I open a chrome tab.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    This explains a lot about why the modern web is the way it is.
    • thfuran 1y ago
      I do think a lot of software would be much better if all devs were working on hardware that was midrange five years ago and over a flaky WiFi connection.
• groby_b 1y ago
  "even the rich FANG types" I think you wanted to say "especially". You're exchanging clearly measurable amounts of money for something extremely nebulous like "developer productivity". As long as the person responsible for spend has a clear line of view on what devs report, buying hardware is (relatively) easy to justify. Once the hardware comes out of a completely different cost center - a 1% savings for that cost center is promotion-worthy, and you'll never be able to measure a 1% productivity drop in devs. It'll look like free money.
• screye 1y ago
  This is especially relevant now that docker has made it easy to maintain local builds of the entire app (fe+be). Factor in local AI flows and the RAM requirements explode. I have a whisper transcription module running at all times on my Mac. Often, I'll have a local telemetry service (langfuse) to monitor the 100s of LLM calls being made by all these models. With AI development it isnt uncommon to have multiple background agents hogging compute. I want each of them to be able to independently build + host and test their changes. The compute load apps up quickly. And I would never push agent code to a cloud env (not even a preview env) because I don't trust them like that and neither should you. Anything below an M4 pro 64GB would be too weak for my workflow. On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up. This workflow is the first time I have needed multiple screens. Pre-agentic coding, I was happy to work on a 14 inch single screen machine with standard thinkpad x1 specs. But, the world has changed.
  • oblio 1y ago
    > On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up. AMD's Strix Halo can have up to 128GB of unified RAM, I think. The bandwidth is less than half the Mac one, but it's probably going to accelerate. Windows doesn't inherently care about this part of the hardware architecture.
• jjmarr 1y ago
  It's not abuse to open 500 Chrome tabs if they're work-related and increase my productivity. I am 100x more expensive than the laptop. Anything the laptop can do instead of me is something the laptop should be doing instead of me.
• benlivengood 1y ago
  It's straightforward to measure this; start a stopwatch every time your flow gets interrupted by waiting for compilation or your laptop is swapping to keep the IDE and browser running, and stop it once you reach flow state again. We managed to just estimate the lost time and management (in a small startup) was happy to give the most affected developers (about 1/3) 48GB or 64GB MacBooks instead of the default 16GB. At $100/hr minimum (assuming lost work doesn't block anyone else) it doesn't take long for the upgrades to pay off. The most affected devs were waiting an hour a day sometimes. This applies to CI/CD pipelines too; it's almost always worth increasing worker CPU/RAM while the reduction in time is scaling anywhere close to linearly, especially because most workers are charged by the minute anyway.
• geor9e 1y ago
  I know a FAANG company whose IT department, for the last few years, has been "out of stock" for SSD drives over 250GB . They claim its a global market issue (it's not). There's constant complaining in the chats for folks who compile locally. The engineers make $300k+ so they just buy a second SSD from Amazon on their credit cards and self-install them without mentioning it to the IT dept. I've never heard a rational explanation for the "shortage" other than chronic incompetence from the team supplying engineers with laptops/desktops. Meanwhile, spinning up a 100TB cloud VM has no friction whatsoever there. It's a cushy place to work tho, so folks just accept the comically dumb aspects everyone knows about.
  • halz 1y ago
    I've wondered if that's to make dealing with full disk backup/forensic collections/retention legal hold/etc easier: keep the official amount of end-user device storage to a minimum. And/or it forces the endpoint to depend on network/cloud storage, giving better business intelligence on what data is "hot".
  • compiler-guy 1y ago
    Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do other than fuss at some random director or feedback form. Or quit, I guess. But that seems a little extreme. Anyway, your choices of what to do about idiocy like this are pretty limited.
• jacobolus 1y ago
  > highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse. Why is that abuse? Having many open browser tabs is perfectly legitimate. Arguably they should switch from Chrome to Safari / lobby Google to care about client-side resource use, but getting as much RAM as possible also seems fine.
• llbbdd 1y ago
  Always amuses me when I see someone use web development as an example like this. Web dev is very easily in the realm of game dev as far as required specs for your machine, otherwise you're probably not doing much actual web dev. If anything, engineers doing nothing but running little Java or Python servers don't need anything more than a PI and a two-color external display to do their job.
• WalterBright 1y ago
  With compiler development work, a low end machine will do just fine, as long as it has a LARGE monitor. (Mine is 3840x2160, and I bought a satellite monitor to extend it.) P.S. you can buy a satellite monitor often for $10 from the thrift store. The one I bought was $10. I don't buy used keyboards because they are dirty and impossible to clean.
• tnkuehne 1y ago
  What would be a good incentivizing strategy to prevent over spending on hardware? I can think of giving a budget and the amount not spend is payed out to them (but when the salary is that high it might not make sense) or like having a internal dashboard where everybody can see every body’s spending on hardware, so people feel bad when they order to much.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • avidiax 1y ago
    Probably better to just request an unreviewed but detailed justification, and then monitor spend and police the outliers after the fact (or when requesting above an invisible threshold, e.g. any fully-specced Apple products). The outliers will likely be two kinds: 1) People with poor judgement or just an outright fraudulent or entitled attitude. These people should be watched for performance issues and managed out as needed. And their hardware reclaimed. 2) People that genuinely make use of high end hardware, and likely have a paper trail of trying to use lower-end hardware and showing that it is inefficient. This doesn't stop the people that overspend slightly so that they are not outliers, but those people are probably not doing substantial damage.
• kelnos 1y ago
  I agree with your overall point, but: > But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand That abuse easily goes into the tens of thousands of dollars, even several hundred thousand, even at a relatively small shop. I just took a quick look at Apple's store, and wow! The most expensive 14" MacBook Pro I could configure (minus extra software) tops out at a little over $7,000! The cheapest is at $1,600, and a more reasonably-specced, mid-range machine (that is probably perfectly sufficient for dev work), can be had for $2,600. Let's even round that up to $3,000. That's $4,000 less than the high end. Even just one crazy-specced laptop purchase would max out your "capped out at a few thousand" figure. And we're maybe not even talking about abuse all the time. An employee might fully earnestly believe that they will be significantly more productive with a spec list that costs $4,000, when in reality that $3,000 will be more or less identical for them. Multiply these individual choices out to a 20 or 40 or 60 person team, and that's real money, especially for a small startup. And we haven't even started talking about monitors and fancy ergonomic chairs and stuff. 60 people spending on average $2,000 each more than they truly need to spend will cost $120k. (And I've worked at a place that didn't eliminate their "buy whatever you think you'll need" policies until they had more than 150 employees!)
• roncesvalles 1y ago
  Not providing 2 monitors to those who want is hare-brained. As far as I'm concerned, 2 monitors = 2x more efficient working.