Something I wish my employer realized is how much value they would get out of providing their developers with good hardware instead of crappy laptops. When it takes 15 minutes to change a line, compile and run the software I’m working on, I’m not going to be very productive.
For context, I work on 2 separate projects that need separate development environments (because they have some conflicting dependencies). One of them has to be in a VM, which significantly affects performance. The laptop was high end 3 years ago, but now it’s beaten even by an Intel i3. It also doesn’t help that the compamy has installed 2 anti-virus software that take up like 30-40% cpu while I am running builds.
Another crappy thing they did was move the infrastructure to AWS… And it costs a ton, performance is shit, and copying files from the build servers is a nightmare… we have to remote into some “copy machine” on AWS, copy the files from the build server to the “copy machine” via samba, upload the files to some internal tool (that’s like OneDrive but worse in every way), and the tool will sync it to our machine. Oh, and the copy machine has very limited storage, it’s win10 on a 40gb drive. It’s insane.
That sounds horrible! How could a machine like that have been high-end in last 15 years? Unless it’s a chromebook. Seriously, is that a typo that it has a 40 gb drive? If not, I’m amazed it can even boot to windows.
I’m so glad my current company is not like this; Couple months ago my coworked started to have issues with running out of ram (16 gb), and noticed that there was an amazing deal on some thinkpads: P14s gen 2, 32 gb ram, 4K, Ryzen 5 pro: 970€ without vat. And now almost everyone in the company has a new laptop! Granted the company is small, 13 employees, making thanigs like this easier.
I have a 9th gen i7. It sounds pretty good, until you look at the i3-13100F which is 30% faster. CPUs have had a huge jump in performance in the last few generations. The laptop is a Dell Precision 5540 from roughly ~2019-2020. I recently received an upgrade to 64GB of ram which helps a lot, but the main bottleneck is the CPU.
For many people it might sound like a good machine. For certain developers, sure, it’s great. But when you work on a complex project written in 3-4 different languages, with a complex build system… it’s pretty bad.
The company has a 5 year machine replacement policy… I have to use this slow piece of shit another 2 years until I can get it replaced.
Yes, 40gb is right. To be fair, we only use it for copying files. Cost cutting because AWS costs money.
Something I wish my employer realized is how much value they would get out of providing their developers with good hardware instead of crappy laptops. When it takes 15 minutes to change a line, compile and run the software I’m working on, I’m not going to be very productive.
For context, I work on 2 separate projects that need separate development environments (because they have some conflicting dependencies). One of them has to be in a VM, which significantly affects performance. The laptop was high end 3 years ago, but now it’s beaten even by an Intel i3. It also doesn’t help that the compamy has installed 2 anti-virus software that take up like 30-40% cpu while I am running builds.
Another crappy thing they did was move the infrastructure to AWS… And it costs a ton, performance is shit, and copying files from the build servers is a nightmare… we have to remote into some “copy machine” on AWS, copy the files from the build server to the “copy machine” via samba, upload the files to some internal tool (that’s like OneDrive but worse in every way), and the tool will sync it to our machine. Oh, and the copy machine has very limited storage, it’s win10 on a 40gb drive. It’s insane.
That sounds horrible! How could a machine like that have been high-end in last 15 years? Unless it’s a chromebook. Seriously, is that a typo that it has a 40 gb drive? If not, I’m amazed it can even boot to windows.
I’m so glad my current company is not like this; Couple months ago my coworked started to have issues with running out of ram (16 gb), and noticed that there was an amazing deal on some thinkpads: P14s gen 2, 32 gb ram, 4K, Ryzen 5 pro: 970€ without vat. And now almost everyone in the company has a new laptop! Granted the company is small, 13 employees, making thanigs like this easier.
I have a 9th gen i7. It sounds pretty good, until you look at the i3-13100F which is 30% faster. CPUs have had a huge jump in performance in the last few generations. The laptop is a Dell Precision 5540 from roughly ~2019-2020. I recently received an upgrade to 64GB of ram which helps a lot, but the main bottleneck is the CPU.
For many people it might sound like a good machine. For certain developers, sure, it’s great. But when you work on a complex project written in 3-4 different languages, with a complex build system… it’s pretty bad.
The company has a 5 year machine replacement policy… I have to use this slow piece of shit another 2 years until I can get it replaced.
Yes, 40gb is right. To be fair, we only use it for copying files. Cost cutting because AWS costs money.