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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

It only pays for itself a priori if you are profitable. If you are not profitable then burn-rate is an existential threat which no one will take seriously if the founders don't.

I definitely agree that you should give developers everything they need to maximize their productivity, including spending an extra few thousands on their workstation, but it should really be what they need. For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs, or the fastest CPUs. Focus on big displays, good ergonomics, ample RAM and good software tools, but that's just me.

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1TB SSDs are consumer drives nowadays, if you want to spend money you can get 2+ TB already, same deal for CPUs, you can get 128GB/8core with consumer CPUs and consumer motherboards (asus x99 deluxe, intel 5960x, corsair lxp 128 kit), the higher end would be xeons or dual xeons where you can get a lot more cores/ram for a lot more $$$.

I agree that you can hit a point of diminishing returns, but it also depends on what you work on, being able to spin up a few VMs to do long-running tests on without impacting your main development environment can pay for itself very quickly, IMHO if you hire somebody good at current rates and expect them to stick around for 4 years, 10k in hardware is still only a couple % of what you are going to pay them over that time, which is immaterial in the grand scheme of things, profitable or not.

"For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs" And that is why you fail. Your already second guessing my needs. I have a 1TB SSD because the 500 was filled. Don't guess. Ask and then supply and don't make me buy it myself.

LOL, I did not fail, I am not your manager. That's why I said "it should really be what they need". Don't smugly put words in my mouth. And while we're being busting out hipster-level snark if you're not willing to put the order in yourself then I start to question is a prima donna who came of age in the boom era and is too precious to do the dirty work that is required to help a company succeed? (http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html )

I think with some edits this could come across more effectively. You're right that the compliant isn't related to what you said, but the way you respond doesn't look very professional. Just my 2c.

Acknowledged, but I've got karma to burn and I'm old enough by SV standards to be have earned my crankiness, so I'll probably continue to take perverse satisfaction by going off from time to time.

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