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Comment by apphacker | Hacker News Reader

> "And no, I don't consider upgrades every 18 months a waste of money if your business depends on the productivity of engineers, but many companies do. I just don't understand it."

I'm currently using an almost 4 year old Macbook Pro for work. One the one hand I seem to be able to do my job 99% of the time just fine, but it can be slow. On the other hand it is an almost 4 year old computer. I haven't complained about it because it's a Macbook Pro and just about everyone else has Dells with Windows XP and I don't think I'd get another Macbook Pro.

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The slow part is the death-knell. It's not just that it takes longer for you to complete your task, it's also that you get distracted while waiting for your slow machine. What's your first response if you hit the compile key and it takes longer than a few seconds? You flip over to browsing the web. That interrupted flow cost you way more than $5000. If you could spend $5000 to make that go away for every engineer in the company, the increased productivity will more than pay for itself over time.

Sometimes, that means more than just paying for the machine on the engineer's desk, it could mean spending money on a cluster of machines just to do distributed compiles. That's also money well spent. Basically, any time you can keep an engineer from interrupting flow by spending money, it's a decision worth careful consideration.

As an extreme example, Google spent millions on SSDs for its source control systems to speed up submits. Money well spent.

flipping over to browse the web the moment you have a couple of minutes free is probably why some companies block access. Employers expect their employees to focus on their job and not flip over at every chance. But what the blocking means for us is something that they ll never understand..

What do you expect engineers to do while code compiles? And flipping to a browser could also mean checking e-mail, filling out expense reports, or scheduling a design meeting. The problem is: even if those things are a productive use of an employee's time, they still interrupt your flow.

I think you got me wrong. I'm one of those engineers who flip over :) What I meant was that the employers do not understand this behavior and all they could do to prevent this is to block access to the Internet which actually harms our work more.

My bosses just significantly upgraded our hardware, mainly because they couldn't afford raises at that time. We knew that's why they were doing it, but it was still nice to get new machines with big monitors.

That's what I think the article is getting at. Hardware is a cheap way to make your employees a little bit happier, and the employees at least know that you're trying.

That's not the point he is trying to make. Computers are the tools of your job. Not providing the best tools is a false economy because the cost is easily offset by the increased productivity of the programmer.

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