Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

> My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company.

This is what happens when you're run by bean counters who don't understand your core business or industry.

View on HN

In the same/similar vein it never ceases to amaze me how employers don't provide their employees with the best tools possible (within reason) to do their jobs. A company will give a developer a low/mid-range laptop/desktop pinching every penny they can then turn around any pay them a huge salary... Like do they not understand that running into RAM/CPU limits makes the developer less effective? I've had jobs where I've easily spent 10x the cost of the better components/computer in time waiting on company-issued computer. Very penny wise and pound foolish.

EDIT:

Two stories that still annoy me to this day:

1. We had been complaining about our slow machines for a while and my PM told me to write up a proposal to send to his boss for new parts. Which, side note, was the last time I went out of my way to /beg/ for equipment to do my job better. Anyway, I write up an email with the reasoning for why we needed new hard drives (SSD's, we were still on spinning rust) and/or more RAM (I think we had ~16GB but we were running VMs). I explained how each part would help and even found cheap versions of both online that would be sufficient for our needs (we are talking <$1-2K total for all of it for the whole team of 4). I specifically said that if it had to come down to one or the other that the SSD would help more than the RAM (and it was cheaper). I never got a reply to the request and then a few weeks later we got new RAM... Like why even pay people with the knowledge/skills if you aren't even going to listen to them or even engage/discuss it.

2. The company was going to buy the developers new machines (finally) and they were testing out various machines (with hardly any input from the developers). All of the developers (4, this wasn't a huge company) had personal Macs they used for meetings/WFH (we only had desktops from work) but the company refused to even consider buying Macs because someone up the chain had a vendetta against Macs. They were looking at crappy laptops that cost the same or more than the MBP's we all wanted but it a complete no-go. This was also the company where I used my personal MBP for work (with begrudging approval) because it was way better than the Dell desktop they gave me (to run Linux on). What made it infuriating was we did cross-platform development (iOS/Android) but I was the only team member who could build/test the iOS builds because I had a Mac. The company provided an old cheese grater Mac Pro (pre-trashcan) that couldn't even be updated to a new enough OS to build apps that could be submitted to Apple...

Mine gave me a top of the line MacBook Pro, fully loaded.

Then loaded so much security crap on it that all cores are maxed out without me even touching machine. Base vim nearly unusable. Then they made it so I could only access things via a double Remote Desktop tunnel.

Basically an expensive space heater.

3 months of nothing done until security software suffered an unfortunate accident.

> suffered an unfortunate accident

scheduled or unscheduled?

I actually had a loop in background that would kill -9 various services every few seconds until I finally got them all uninstalled.

If you can kill -9 it sounds like it could have been uninstalled?

You need to kill -9 the denial-of-service-causing services so you can actually interact with the system in order to delete them. (I used to have to do this with organizational Windows machines before I realized I could boot off a livecd and either rm -rf them, or just install a real operating system; I assume OSX/MBP is similar.)

If I select "unscheduled" will I have to fill a survey before I can reboot the machine?

Ugh, this is something that friends of mine have to deal with. Thankfully my current employer sent me a new MBP with nothing on it but the core OS. It does annoy me they didn't get the 32GB version, like it was ~$400 to bump that up but no. I've easily spent more than $400 worth of time watching a beachball spin while I find what is eating all my memory.

my 'git status' command takes 6 seconds around 2pm-4pm when internal network traffic is high... go figure.

(i use this cmd a lot!)

git status is not supposed to use the network, unless you're running it on an networked file system

Have you tried running git gc (maybe --aggressive) and similar commands?

How? That command doesn't even hit the network...

One possibility is that your global git config files are on a network drive. I had that problem on a corporporate laptop.

I had a friend that worked for Intel and he had the absolute worst work laptop of anyone I know. I can't recall what it was exactly, but I remember it even had a low tier Intel chip.

I work at Intel right now. My laptop is serviceable but not the best, and it's loaded down with a bunch of spyware crap. Luckily, I just need it to SSH (either through VSCode or PuTTY) into my servers, which are nice and powerful.

I was helping an intern out, and they had him using literally the worst laptop I have ever seen. It had about as much power as a Chromebook, and it was running the same spyware that I had. No wonder he couldn't get anything done.

Oh man, this. I remember I worked at a major defence contractor, and we absolutely bombed, like failed through the floor an employee satisfaction survey. And when the VP finally sat down with people they expressed how shitty the computers had gotten. And he's like wait a second. No one ever told me this. I can solve 90% of my morale problems by writing a cheque for like $200k?!?

It was astounding how large the disconnect had grown between management and the front line. And also astounding how cheaply the employee morale was fixed once he wrote that cheque.

All my experiences around this have pounded into my brain that if I ever run my company or if I am an executive I will do everything in my power to make sure all the employees under me have the best tools to do their job. Labor is one of the most expensive costs, not empowering your employees to be the best they can be is just stupid and wasteful.

My dad ran a software consulting company eons ago and he had a new programmer start but he didn't have a laptop so my dad took him to Best Buy (that's where you bought computers back then) and told him to pick out a laptop. They guy picked one and my dad was like "How about this one, isn't it better?" and the guy said "Yeah, but it's more expensive". My dad bought the better laptop and gave it to the guy and told him it was his now (as in not the companies). That guy was over the moon and my dad told me that it was the best money he ever spent. Not only did he effectively "buy" a ton of loyalty with that move but he would make up the cost of the laptop in a week or so off that programmer alone (difference between what he paid the employee and what he billed them out at).

I also remember going to Sam's Club with my dad to buy snacks for the office. He kept snacks, candy, drinks, etc well stocked at all times and told his employees they could have as much as they wanted, no limits. Happy employees are productive employees, why more people don't get that I'll never know...

Sometimes they do, but they just don't care that certain (or even all) employees are as productive as possible. They might even have a fancy graph showing how they're optimizing for some unit of productivity per unit of cost, so making employees more productive isn't worth it.

One of the best pieces of advice I got early in my career was "Whatever you end up doing, make sure the company sees you as a profit center rather than a cost center, because companies are much more free with their checkbooks to the people they think are directly responsible for making the company money," and though things aren't nearly that black and white, it's definitely been a good general principle.

> how large the disconnect had grown between management and the front line

That's just the nature of leadership positions. As people get high up in the position, the view of the company is shaped by their staff and reports. The VP never hear of the problem simply because no one ever told the VP. VP never asked about it because again no one ever told the VP. That's why corporates seem to ask a million surveys and reports because there is no other way to know that information.

What if employee surveys were never conducted? The VP would only know about the employee satisfaction issue if everyone left, well beyond the point that it's fixable. If you are on the ground, it's easy to ask your coworkers for that information. But if you are the VP, that's not possible.

If you're the VP, one of your main responsibilities is to ensure the structure you put in place has not that kind of issues.

> It was astounding how large the disconnect had grown between management and the front line

Isn't this the core of the MBA-hate argument ? That they occupy middle-layer positions, and actively obfuscate messages and merit from front line in order to redirect all the benefits for themselves ?

There is also a darwinian component there, where such behavior is beneficial to game company evaluation, so that only people with similar principles end up being promoted, then actively scuttling any other middle managers that don't adhere to the same set of principles since they are effectively representing a dangerous rival set of values, thus ensuring that after a few cycles, only they remain.

That's how culture evolve in (most) big companies where upper management don't make an active effort to keep middle management in check. A begrudging hard work, that most prefer to skip (get the quick compensation, and move on).

That's also why there is a big difference when companies still have their founders in, as they tend to pay more attention to these issues since they are personally invested in company's future and brand, than recently promoted middle managers which are just temporarily in for the check.

I am living through this. It is especially true if you are at a company that does software, but is not their primary business. IT seems to have total control and puts very little thought into developer experience. Give everyone the same slow mid-tier machines, force everyone to use Windows whether they want to or not, then overload them with security bloat, then require a slow VPN connection. It's sad.

> IT seems to have total control and puts very little thought into developer experience

To be fair, I can assure you that developers give very little thought to the experience of people who have to support their software too.

> It is especially true if you are at a company that does software, but is not their primary business

Time to switch job?

I guess management has never been anywhere close to Palo Alto.

Heh, when I wanted one more hard drive (for taking backups) my manager was having hours of meetings with his managers, PO and some more for half a year. At the end we did not get this hard drive. They easily spent like 20-30 more on they combined wages wasted on this meetings than this hard drive would cost...

Quote 1: "...even consider buying Macs because...crappy laptops that cost the same or more than the MBP's we all wanted but it a complete no-go."

Lemme call this BS. Apple's hardware is expensive crap compared to other. I can make at least 50% cheaper from parts desktops/laptops having the same performance.

Quote 2: "...but we were running VMs...but I was the only team member who could build/test the iOS builds because I had a Mac."

I call this another BS. My machine is running Windows as host OS. My VMs are Linux(Ubuntu and Mint)/Android(both Vm and emulators - Bluestacks an Memu)/Raspbian and MacOS (at least 10 MacOS VMs starting with Mountain Lion 12 years ago and copy/upgrade a new one every time a new MacOS was released). I can run any flavor I want and do cross-platform build at the same time.

Conclusion - you're lying.

I was just talking to my coworkers about this. If you're providing an engineer a laptop for 3 years and paying them a large salary, why would you skimp on $400 on the 16GB->32GB upgrade for free productivity?

Same for the current COVID situation. Providing every engineer with minimum dual monitor and a proper desk is only going to provide you with output gains for very little investment.

Companies will pay whatever they think they can get away with. Some companies with high social cachet like Tesla pay quite poorly [1], and yet people want to work there.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Tesla,Google,Facebook,Micros...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com