3 ms·

There are 8 enginers at my startup. Four use Lenovo laptops (1 with the write on screen), 2 use Mac Book Pro's, and 2 use desktops. In terms of power, we're all

There are 8 enginers at my startup. Four use Lenovo laptops (1 with the write on screen), 2 use Mac Book Pro's, and 2 use desktops. In terms of power, we're all on Linux or Mac OSX and we have enough power for most stuff, if we need more there is a 16 core build server we share. In terms of interface, we all have 2 monitors and nice keyboards and just put the laptop on a stand during the day. The productivity of being able to just grab your laptop and take it home for late night hacking, or on an airplane to a conference, or in a meeting you just don't want to pay attention to outweighs giving up 20% more power.

dasil003 18y ago
So true. I can take my laptop home. I can take it to the coffee shop. Tomorrow I'm taking a bus up to Tahoe to do snowboarding. 4 hour bus ride will allow me to get plenty of work done on the way (thank you git!). 30" display + Aeron is definitely well worth it for office productivity, but frankly 4GB+2Ghz+2cores is plenty of juice for my typical web dev load which includes Photoshop/Illustrator/2 Parallels Instances. When people make these arguments about 2x performance increasing dev performance by a similar factor I call bullshit. Frankly I spend less than 5-10% of my time waiting for the machine, and even when I do that I'm still thinking, which is what developers should be spending most of their time doing anyway. Better approach to developer productivity is incremental process improvement. Analyze problems. Automate checks to prevent them in the future. Spend time refactoring. Maintain a test suite. Set up continuous integration. Over time these things make the difference of an order of magnitude for programmer productivity.