They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?
Amazon also allows you to byoc and image it. Images are easily available. Bias for action gets u far.
After a few days I bought one, too, took it home, and took the 2x 23" monitors it replaced to the office.
In a different department another friend systematically acquired new large monitors for her dev team. Her management chain complained about the expense.
Bias for action not only gets you far, it attracts folks to your team inside a company. ;-)
A year later they stopped issuing SSDs and I have to do the whole "managerial approval" thing to get any variation from the "standard" machine, so I am more than a year overdue for a replacement.
The inventory sheet will never be reconciled over that monitor, unless it breaks.
I wanted second 30" monitor, so I filed a ticket. They sent me long email listing reasons why I shouldn't get a second monitor, including (numbers are approximate, employee count from 2013 or so) "If every googler gets an extra monitor, in a year it would be equivalent to driving Toyota Camry for 18000 miles."
I'm thinking "this can't possible be right", so I spend some time calculating, and it turned out to be approximately correct. So I'm thinking, "we should hire one less person and give everyone an extra monitor!". I replied "yes, I understand, go ahead and give me an extra monitor anyway". They replied "we'll require triple management approval!". Me: "please proceed". First two managers approved the request, director emails me "Why I'm bother with this?". Me: "they want your approval to give me second monitor", him: "whatever".
And finally few days later I got a second monitor...
I had no idea Google was so cheap. Gourmet breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day? No problem. A couple hundred bucks for a second monitor? Uh... it's not about the money, we're, uh, concerned about the environment.
These eke a few more hours of work out of you per day.
> A couple hundred bucks for a second monitor?
Arguments about productivity aside (I agree, more productive), these don't.
Not sure if I can take it with when I leave, but hey, at least now I have my second monitor and it cost less than $300 - I'll probably bequeath it to a fellow employee.
Comments like these (why can't I just do X?), it's like the difference between being single and being in a serious relationship. When you're single, you can do whatever you want. When you're in a serious relationship, you can't just make whatever decisions you want without talking to your partner. Well, big corporate enterprise is like that on steroids, because instead of having one partner, you have several or dozens, and everyone needs to buy in.
Capex => Opex has a name. It's called "a loan". So let's model cloud usage as a loan. Let's assume you want, for an employee, a machine learning rig and you set depreciation on 2 years. Let's also assume that the article is correct about the ballpark figures, somewhere around $1400/month for renting, and $3000 for the machine.
And let's ignore the difference in power usage, extra space, bandwidth, ... (which is going to be 2 digit dollars at the very most anyway, since you need all that for the employee in the first place)
So how much interest does cloud charge for this Capex => Opex change ? Well 33600/30000.5 or 613.5% per year. Pretty much every bank on the planet will offer very low credit score companies 30% loans, even 10% is very realistic.
There are no words ... Just give the man his bloody machine. Hell, give him 5, 4 just in case 3 fail, and 1 for Crysis just to be a "nice" guy (you're not really being so nice: you're saving money) and you still come out ahead of the cloud.
We both know why this doesn't happen, the real reason: you don't trust your employees. Letting this employee have that machine would immediately cause a jealousy fight within the company, and cause a major problem. That's of course why the GP comment is right: leave this bloody nightmare of a company, today.
Well I mean they obviously can...
First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012.
Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me have a machine with top of line specs with several cards or, heaven forbid, several machines, (but they'll happily let me have a laptop that costs just as much for less than half the performance).
At our enterprise, we have HP ultrabooks or however they are called. Windows 7, 32 Bit. You know, it has a decent i5 on it, but there is some specific bottleneck making it terrible. Every employee that sits in an office has this piece of crap.
Takes 3 minutes to start IntelliJ. Since some years ~50 developers were able to get Macbooks, luckily I am one of them, else I'd just be pissed off every single work day.
You need to repeat that every couple years though.
Any buying requests go through the direct supervisor, the financial department, the director of the company, then back to the supervisor for the final signature. And because it's Germany, it was on paper. When I say any buying request, I mean any. From any programming book, to any accounting book for finance or any HR book.
You'd think people at the top have better things to do. You think that, until you hear the department heads discuss which excel format files should be saved in.
Typically if you want to buy some hardware in a big Corp you go to some preapptoved internal catalog to pick up from one or two models of desktop or a laptop from vendors like Dell, HP, or Lenovo - whatever was preapproved. Sometimes you can fine tune specs but not in a very wide range.
Buying anything outside of that will require senior level approval and - heaven forbid - “vendor approval study” (or similar verbiage).
When I left the company, the engineering director was working out how to let his team go rogue - basically handling all of their own IT support, the only caveat being that they had to install IT's intrusion detection software, but aside from that, an engineer would be able to buy any machine within a certain budget.
And good luck getting the cost center ID for the initial ticket submission to start with.
It’s all ITs own fault frankly - or more like fault of corporations approaching IT as mostly a desktop Helpdesk support.