Ask HN: Why are software companies stingy with developer hardware upgrades? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are software companies stingy with developer hardware upgrades?

17 pointsfrankus24 comments

Or, if you reject the premise, then “why does it seem like every software company I’ve worked for has been stingy with hardware upgrades?”

A new laptop every year would be in the low single digit percentage of the fully loaded cost of an average US developer, even assuming a one-year-old laptop can’t be sold, traded in, or repurposed. It seems like it would be a win if it improved productivity and/or retention even a tiny little bit.

But pretty much everywhere I’ve worked has had a “every three years” or “every four years” hardware upgrade policy.

Is there some accounting quirk that makes this kind of spending especially bad? Am I weird in that I’d probably take a new laptop (that, to be clear, the company would still own) over an equivalent raise?

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Here's how it goes where I work:

- Someone needs something

- They ask for it

- The company buys it.

I haven't asked for one laptop per year because I don't think a few CPU clocks will improve my productivity that much. However, couches, nice chairs, books, headsets, screens, good lighting, flexibility with respect to life, bonuses, careful hiring not to mess the team, a view on a mediterranean port in a country that's pretty much sunny most of the year, transparency, inclusion in everything, alignment, and working on interesting problems improves retention and productivity.

We buy good laptops according to the tastes of our people. One engineer could not use a laptop that didn't have a nipple/joystick/pointing stick (Thinkpad). Although it was strange, that's what the engineer got.

However, there are things where we notice latent demand and we don't wait for someone to ask. For example, we had one couch. We found that everyone wanted to use the couch and there would be a game of dibs, so we bought more couches.

Bear in mind that we had a period of struggle and we went cockroach mode. Everyone knew it and everyone knew we couldn't afford stuff, but there was acceptance because the information was out there. The rationale behind not buying something was communicated: the money is tight. We'd buy that if he had more, and we did buy when we had more.

I don’t know why. But I worked as security at a federal government organization. I noticed doing daily tasks was taxing my workstation and saw it only had 2 gigs of ram. I talked to my colleagues and they mentioned they had been putting in requests every year for more ram and we get nothing. Later I attended a procurement meeting and saw the manager of the dev team screaming that his team couldn’t compile certain programs with 1 gig of ram and it was ridiculous he had been asking for more ram for 6 months and still nothing. So I then used my security access to run an enterprise host query to find the average ram of the machines + a vlookup() function to map user and department to machine. I saw the IT department had machines averaging 32 gigs of ram and even some machines with 64 gigs and one with 192 gigs. These were individual workstations and not some server. While everyone else was running anywhere from 1 to 4 gigs. To verify my suspicions, I then used my access to remotely run a script run for a month on every machine which would check every hour the % of RAM used and report back. Many of these IT machines were barely using 10%. So I printed out the evidence of my findings and went to the following procurement meeting the next month and suggested we redistribute the RAM based on role function and need. The meeting basically went south very quickly and abruptly ended with no outcome. So next month when they suddenly laid off a team next to us, we just ripped the ram out of those computers and put them in ours before IT could come to collect them. So I guess I am saying blame your IT team.

Let's stop comparing every single expense with the "fully loaded cost of an average US developer". Averages are skewed by higher end companies. There's some weird thinking that permeates these sorts of discussions that somehow every developer is $500k/year, because some facebook and google engineers get stock options.

"It seems like it would be a win if it improved productivity and/or retention even a tiny little bit." Why? Perhaps your "seems like" is, in fact, wrong, and there's no measurable improvement in my you the latest gear every year. Perhaps you get a 1% 'productivity improvement' over the year - on 2000 hrs, let's say that's 20 hrs more of 'productivity' from you. But all the overhead - purchasing overhead, inventory management, network provisioning, security checks, your time in moving stuff over, reinstalling/upgrading your software, moving keys, etc - costs more than that mythical 1% of 'improvement' you might deliver.

I bought my own RAM for a company-provided tower once, and a couple IT folks flipped out. But it did make my system measurably important, and cost me... $70 at the time (something like that) - went from swapping to spinning rust all the time to everything fitting in memory, and no swapping. But it ruffled feathers, even though the company was not out any money.

Take the raise. Become an independent consultant. Charge more. Buy your own hardware, use what you want.

Most companies stick to the regular tax depreciation schedules, for computers 3 years is standard in most countries. You can deviate from this though if you can justify it.

And personally I wouldn't favor a new laptop over a pay raise, as the laptop will lose its value over time and is not yours to keep, while you can put a pay rise into your personal savings (and if you really want you can still buy a laptop from it).

I'd be pretty pissed off if the company I worked for was replacing all the hardware every year, that just seems wasteful.

My personal laptop is 2 years old and I can't imagine needing to replace it in the next 12 months. The one I had before this was 6 years old when I replaced it, and even then I didn't need to. Although that was back in the days when MacBooks were easy to upgrade

As a developer I don't want to be on the cutting edge of hardware, then you get into telling the users to always get faster machines (like you have), new OSs, etc. Prefer to be near the trailing edge where the code is stable and software optimization really makes a difference.

Where do you guys see the benefits of you having newer hardware than your customers?

The customers run the optimized software, I need to compile it (and run other expensive buildsteps), run (slower) debug builds of it, run it with profilers slowing it down, ...

You can track latency and whatnot through KPIS, there’s no need to shoot yourself in the foot over it.

If it really sucks you’ll know; there’s that famous experiment where 100ms in latency at 2006 Amazon was $100M in sales.

This is a valid concern for web and desktop development, but it's not uncommon to be cross-compiling for a mobile or embedded system where that isn't a concern.

I don't see what you'd meaningfully gain from a new laptop every year, their performance doesn't increase that much year-in-year.

For other hardware its IMHO more an an issue (e.g. giving developers only laptops or standard desktop PCs when they could make use of properly fast workstations, skimping on screens, ...), and probably in most places just a case of "that's we do for everyone, and doing it differently for you sounds like effort" and structures that make it overly complicated to approve such requests.

(FWIW I work for a small company that only does software and haven't seen a reasonable hardware request rejected yet - if someone can articulate why what they have isn't enough, they get a reasonable upgrade)

That's fairly standard. The laptop once purchased becomes an asset on the company accounts and then get's depreciated each year in line with local tax regulations. 3 years is the typical depreciation timeline.

If you think that's bad, it's even worse at many non-tech companies.

The profit center employees (say, traders at a bank or hedge fund) get top of the line machines. The cost center employees (tech) get shafted.

A few takeaways for me here:

I'm kind of weird in that having the latest shiny technology makes me unreasonably happy. Which means there might be an arbitrage opportunity for companies to pay slightly less and cater to weirdos like me.

A lot of this is not unlike personal finance: if what you have now is fine, do you really need to upgrade? And also a lot of costs are just sort of non-negotiably baked into the budget (e.g. payroll, mortgage), and what's left is relatively small and carefully spent. I could see how tight cash flow could make this even more of an issue.

The more-frequent-replacement requests I've had have more been around new capabilities rather than raw performance. Like being able to charge off an iPad charger in a pinch, or being able to run iOS apps natively.

Lastly I'd point to The Joel Test[1], which has mixed results in terms of how well it has aged, but mostly that some of the items are even more "table stakes" than they were at the time it was originally published. But a lot of it still rings true, and number 9 is Do you use the best tools money can buy?

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

I’ve had the same problem at my company (a FAANG), which recently extended the replacement cycle for most laptops to 3 years from 2, mostly issues machines that are too slow to both video call and program, and is very stingy about replacement (e.g. for failing MacBook keyboards). I think it’s probably a sign that execs are worried about the economic climate and looking to cut costs.

We had the same issues at Amazon. We all had the lowest end spec of the 2019 13" macbook pro (issued in 2019), even SDE3 level engineers. It fucking sucked.

"every 3 years", and you think it's unbearable ? until last year, on the big bank i work for, most developer's machines on IT still had cdrom and floppy drives installed... only the cdrom i was able to try, since i didn't have a floppy disk for ages.

my old work pc (that I got rid of last year) struggled when having outlook open :(

Personally, I don’t want to be forced to get a new laptop every year.

If you want to give me the option of buying the biggest, fastest, meanest laptop of the make and model I want, that’s awesome! But I don’t need a new one every year.

Sometimes new laptops require new versions of the OS. And I might want to stick with an older version of the OS.

Sometimes new laptops are on a new hardware architecture tha5 I don’t want to be forced to use. At least, not yet.

Give me the options, sure. But don’t force me.

There can be several factors (not all related to software companies).

- Budget

Money goes to different departments. Some managers are better than others at winning internal bids.

- Regulations and internal policies

Big corp procedures can sink any request.

- Project

Consulting world. It's likely you get a lighter, shinier and faster machine if you’re going to spend lots of time at the client site.

- Migration procedure

At some companies the IT support can lack manpower to process high volume of migrations. I've seen this taking months.

I've worked at a company that was very particular about the disposal of hardware. To prevent competitors from gleaning information, all hard drives were unscrewed and shredded before the rest of the hardware was sent to recycling. That process was quite time consuming, so reducing the upgrade cycle to one year would have required lots of extra work.

Worse, i find they waste money on crappy hardware from bad system integrators. If you could take the money they spend and buy systems yourself, you can easily get much better computers.

Why would you need a new laptop every year? What are you doing that's so demanding on resources? Even if that were the case, i suggest you rent a beefy server and a cheap chromebook

Getting a fully decked out developer machine every 2-3 years is stingy? Fuck me, the kids are even more spoiled than I thought.

I'm running on a 2017 MacBook Pro with 16GB ram, and I can still run everything without problems. Local database servers, multiple IDEs, Microsoft Teams (which is a resource hog) and even a Windows VM.

You want a free upgrade every year? Do you upgrade your personal desktop tower or laptop every year?

Three years is likely the depreciation timeline, but would a new laptop be meaningfully faster than one a year old?

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