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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

Nobody’s better at letting better be the enemy of good than software engineers. For some reason our culture likes to argue and nitpick over the most mundane stuff, usually missing the forest for the trees.

I’ve had jobs where the manpower spent just arguing outweighed the cost of the change significantly. One dickhead manager I had spent weeks arguing over the acquisition of a $500 SSD. It made me want to slap $500 down on the table just so he’d shut the fuck up already.

The only way I know to counteract it is by saying “don’t let better be the enemy of good”.

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I had a manager argue over the cost of a training class once. They'd moved me to a new team with unfamiliar tech and I wanted to bone up on some concepts before getting started.

It was an $11 online class on Udemy.

(Well, technically it was a "$199" class, conveniently discounted to $11. You know how Udemy rolls.)

Generally, I'd say nobody's that petty. A manager would typically only be that petty if trying to get somebody to leave. However... this guy was not very good at his job.

I don't think he was literally upset over $11, and clearly our relationship was on the rocks at the point, but I'm not sure what his exact problem was. May have been me on a personal level. May have been the fact that I wanted to spend a working day uh, learning to do my job better. Perhaps he didn't feel anything on Udemy could be worthwhile. Perhaps it was just his fragile yet rampant ego. Could have been any of those things or all of those things. Nonetheless, it's hilarious that an $11 class was where he attempted to draw some sort of line.

I had to explain to my supervisor's boss' boss (Division VP of a $800M USD/year company) for an hour on why I needed a $45 piece of software to read/understand binary files.

A few points:

1. Computing and engineering in general is such a discipine where one nitpicky detail can make all the difference. One bit flip, one keystone, one badly selected material. However, the conduct of negotiation, could be improved as always, but it's a general listening problem most of the time.

2. From the dickheads point or view, everything can be solved by spending more money on HW. Each unexpected spend like this is a risk to open the floodgates and lose both financial and engineering discipline by setting a bad precedent. Not sure you want easy handed decisions there as well.

It makes no sense to cheap out on hardware though. It's such a tiny cost compared to the overall cost of the employee, you are wasting money if inadequate hardware is making your employees less productive.

In one sense, it doesn't make sense. The productivity boost would likely be worth it alone.

From another perspective, this is a +500$ post in the cost column of that unit (and perhaps n*500 if the whole unit then comes asking for the same thing). The cost of spending time arguing is baked into the cost of salary, meaning it doesn't show since it's the same regardless. It's a form of optimization, but the optimized unit is not productivity.

A friend of mine was working as a recruiter where the whole company was sitting all day long at their laptops. He was denied buying an external screen to be more efficient since he then could have more information on the screen (eg an application next to a browser), "because then everybody wants one", even buying it himself.

edit: nb I'm not arguing for not buying the ssd/screen.

    He was denied buying an external screen to be more
    efficient since he then could have more information on the
    screen (eg an application next to a browser), "because 
    then everybody wants one", even buying it himself.

My wife was denied permission to bring her own secondary monitor from home for that reason. Unreal.

I also faced pushback at one job for bringing my own monitor from home. Same reason given. I'm an entitled software developer though, so I basically disregarded my manager on that one and he let it go.

We set up a monitor for my wife at her large corporate job without asking permission. While the rest of her office had tiny 1280x1024 screens from 10 years ago, she had a 1920x1200 24" monitor in addition to the corporate shit monitor.

Sometimes people would ask her about it, she would say she bought it herself, and they would say "oh" and move on about their day. It was a complete non-issue.

You could argue people shouldn't be plugging in random components at work and whatnot, but at the end of the day, IT is really powerless to do much about it. Nobody's going to fire you for buying your own productivity enhancers, the situation is just too embarrassing for management if they're reasonable people.

And really, Excel is so focused on visual space that having a larger display for her is a quality of life issue that only costs $120.

I completely agree, but there really are managers petty or shortsighted enough to block this stuff.

I think one mistake my wife made, though, was mentioning it to her boss before she did it.

What she should have done was done it. Then her boss would be more inclined to let her keep it.

> From another perspective, this is a +500$ post in the cost column of that unit (and perhaps n500 if the whole unit then comes asking for the same thing). The cost of spending time arguing is baked into the cost of salary, meaning it doesn't show since it's the same regardless. It's a form of optimization, but the optimized unit is not productivity.

I'm not seeing the point here. What is* being optimised for? If there's an easily-worthwhile productivity-boost, what else is there to say?

If the whole department would see a similar increase in productivity from scaling-up the expenditure, isn't it the job of management to ensure it happens?

> He was denied buying an external screen to be more efficient since he then could have more information on the screen (eg an application next to a browser), "because then everybody wants one", even buying it himself.

This is just plain stupidity, isn't it? Is there something I've missed here?

You are not missing the point, is sure is plain stupidity I'm highlighting :) If it was me I would buy the screens in this case. Just meaning that some may optimize for keeping a entirely separate column of "other expenses" to as low as possible (for whatever reasons) even if it hurts overall productivity. Seen it happen.

That's just a long way of saying myopic, no?

Spening a few hours of time on the topic is literally more valuable that the ssd itself. So what if you spend a few k per employee more. It is basically a rounding error in overall comp. This is also why I dont understand companies trying to save money on perks...

But we’d be paying $50 per month for free coffee! The 5% productivity boost is just not worth it.

It’s like they deliberately avoid facing facts.

We once spent an entire summer trying to add functionality to an app where some of the customers were already running at max capacity on their self-hosted hardware.

I was trying to explain to my boss how stupid it was for us to spend $100k to avoid a handful of customers having to buy $3k in hardware apiece. It would have been cheaper for us to gift them a box. The opportunity costs of that boondoggle ended up being a huge negative for that team.

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