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> One programmer costs ~ 300 cores. (Bay Area salary with benefits vs. AWS EC2 pricing) That is gibberish. If I work at a company and we have 5 machines with 1

> One programmer costs ~ 300 cores. (Bay Area salary with benefits vs. AWS EC2 pricing) That is gibberish. If I work at a company and we have 5 machines with 12 cores apiece already in place that is what I have to make do with. We don't all live in an elastic world. Further to that the scaling of large single computations across cores is a costly and often pointless exercise.

PaulHoule 13y ago
You're lucky. Some places are so inelastic that developers get hand-me-down laptops from sales people who couldn't sell, or when they buy a new machine from Dell they get one with two cores.
- dekhn 13y ago
  So.... they pay you a salary right? So long as they don't prevent it... you can take some of the money your company allocates to salary, and reallocate it to buying a few cheap VMs.
  - carbocation 13y ago
    You could also contribute to the company's rent payment. It would have a similar wealth transfer effect.
  - mempko 13y ago
    If a company is making a profit, they owe more to you than you to them....
    - dekhn 13y ago
      you're profitsharing, right? so if you go around the company's self limiting policies, and make more profit by using your salary... then it's a net win to you.
  - PaulHoule 13y ago
    I was working as an enumerator for the U.S. Census in the year 2000 and one of the people on my team realized that for 2 hours worth of pay she could buy office supplies that would save us all (and the government) 60 hours worth of work. She was stressed because there wasn't any official channel for us to buy office supplies other than the stuff they sent us. I told her to buy the office supplies and say that she worked another 2 hours; this was breaking the rules but this did not strike me as at all unethical. Now, not long after the 2008 crunch I was getting pissed about how long builds took on my cheap laptop (on which I was running both the client and server sides of a complex app). Getting a better machine from management was out of the question, but I liked other aspects of the job, and 2009 wasn't the best time to go job seeking. So I bought myself a top end desktop computer and three inexpensive monitors. When I left that company they wanted to buy the machine off me so as to keep all the proprietary code and data on it, but as things worked out, the value of my own proprietary code and data on that machine was worth a lot to me so I kept it, and fortunately things never went to court. This type of decision has risks (for instance, you don't want to be the guy who loses a machine with social security numbers on it and forces his employer to pay for credit monitoring for 70,000 people) but it can be the right thing to do sometimes.
    - pyoung 13y ago
      I am surprised that they let you use your own machine. I am also surprised that they didn't get the code and data from you (or take you to court), as most employment contracts state that all work done by the employee is considered company property.
tlb 13y ago
Yeah, companies do that all the time. Spend 3 months of a good engineer's time to save a few thousand bucks in hardware because the budget allocation is fixed. In the long run, I think companies that value human capital appropriately will win.
- jre 13y ago
  A lot of problems are going to require quite a bit of engineering to scale to 300 cores... I mean, if you're just serving some simple webpage, it's easy to just throw servers at it. But if you want to implement say a distributed k-means, the algorithm is different than for the single-threaded case. Not everything is easily scalable...
- asdasf 13y ago
  Yeah, companies do that all the time. Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on hosting and hardware costs to save a few hours of a programmer's time because they blindly believe in the completely unfounded "truth" you are parroting.

PaulHoule 13y ago

You're lucky. Some places are so inelastic that developers get hand-me-down laptops from sales people who couldn't sell, or when they buy a new machine from Dell they get one with two cores.

dekhn 13y ago
So.... they pay you a salary right? So long as they don't prevent it... you can take some of the money your company allocates to salary, and reallocate it to buying a few cheap VMs.
- carbocation 13y ago
  You could also contribute to the company's rent payment. It would have a similar wealth transfer effect.
- mempko 13y ago
  If a company is making a profit, they owe more to you than you to them....
  - dekhn 13y ago
    you're profitsharing, right? so if you go around the company's self limiting policies, and make more profit by using your salary... then it's a net win to you.
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  I was working as an enumerator for the U.S. Census in the year 2000 and one of the people on my team realized that for 2 hours worth of pay she could buy office supplies that would save us all (and the government) 60 hours worth of work. She was stressed because there wasn't any official channel for us to buy office supplies other than the stuff they sent us. I told her to buy the office supplies and say that she worked another 2 hours; this was breaking the rules but this did not strike me as at all unethical. Now, not long after the 2008 crunch I was getting pissed about how long builds took on my cheap laptop (on which I was running both the client and server sides of a complex app). Getting a better machine from management was out of the question, but I liked other aspects of the job, and 2009 wasn't the best time to go job seeking. So I bought myself a top end desktop computer and three inexpensive monitors. When I left that company they wanted to buy the machine off me so as to keep all the proprietary code and data on it, but as things worked out, the value of my own proprietary code and data on that machine was worth a lot to me so I kept it, and fortunately things never went to court. This type of decision has risks (for instance, you don't want to be the guy who loses a machine with social security numbers on it and forces his employer to pay for credit monitoring for 70,000 people) but it can be the right thing to do sometimes.
  - pyoung 13y ago
    I am surprised that they let you use your own machine. I am also surprised that they didn't get the code and data from you (or take you to court), as most employment contracts state that all work done by the employee is considered company property.

tlb 13y ago

Yeah, companies do that all the time. Spend 3 months of a good engineer's time to save a few thousand bucks in hardware because the budget allocation is fixed. In the long run, I think companies that value human capital appropriately will win.

jre 13y ago
A lot of problems are going to require quite a bit of engineering to scale to 300 cores... I mean, if you're just serving some simple webpage, it's easy to just throw servers at it. But if you want to implement say a distributed k-means, the algorithm is different than for the single-threaded case. Not everything is easily scalable...
asdasf 13y ago
Yeah, companies do that all the time. Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on hosting and hardware costs to save a few hours of a programmer's time because they blindly believe in the completely unfounded "truth" you are parroting.