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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I wish companies would force developers to use much slower machines than they are normally given, so that they will be more efficient with what they do, since chances are that the majority of your users won't be running extremely high-end hardware either.

...and I'm saying this as a developer myself.

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I've visited customers where we hit "build" and then wait about 15 minutes for an incremental build of a project.

Every day I was there they could have bought a faster machine with the amount of money they were paying me to wait for builds to complete. They were developing embedded software, so the "dogfooding their customer's machines" was non-sensical.

Very good point. I've thought that about Google, starting years ago. Look at the Wave fiasco / failure. That would not have happened (at least due to reasons of unusable slowness) if your suggestion had been implemented there. And there are many other examples of their products needing more machine horsepower. On the contrary, they equip their developers with high-end machines. How dumb. It should at least be a mix of low and high-end, and should be made compulsory to test the products on low-end satisfactorily before release.

It still happens, see Android development experience with Studio and build times.

Yes, seen tangentially earlier, when I consulted to a startup using Android as one of the stacks. Happy I did not have to work on it, going by what I have read about its too frequent changes. Like the JavaScript framework du jour :)

https://mobile.twitter.com/vasudevram/status/127075265940270...

Idk, waiting on a task kick me out of the zone real fast, and as I age it takes longer for me to get into it.

Building the dmd D compiler with itself takes a few seconds.

I always used an older, slower machine, and that was one of the reasons. Still do, my main machine is about 8 years old.

Not quite. Run your tests on an old machine. I remember testing some software over a slow dial-up line (1990s) and it was possible to see how slowly certain actions were painted on the screen. Being able to see that allowed me to make optimisations I wouldn't otherwise have considered.

I've tried a few times to get into Twitch streaming (as a viewer), though I don't play video games. I've come across a few programmers who've chosen to host streams there. Besides other reasons that also contribute to the failures of those experiments, I come away thinking about how unusably bad the Twitch website is. It hit me for the first time a few weeks ago why that was.

Doing 4th generation programming language is what we forced ourself into. Instead of complied in minutes we do one run in 5 hours using a mainframe . And our boss said it is better than 1960s using visual approach.

Tragedy of the commons.

If you do this, your programmers will leave your company. And your competitors will offer them better computers.

You'd need all software companies to sync and do this, or at least a large majority.

I think a good solution is to have a lowest common denominator machine, and rotate developers through using it for a day, maybe once a month.

Windows

Celeron

2-4gb ram

5400rpm hard drive

No administrative privileges

Shitty antivirus installed

1080p monitor

Or at least test on lower class machines.

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