Hacker News Reader

Comment by etaty | Hacker News Reader

Give each year/month credits to your engineers to buy a new computer and give them a way to 'buy' extra credits. So some of them will wait longer, some will buy a new machine each year.

Give them the liberty to choose!

View on HN

You're forgetting the cost of maintaining a separate machine type for every developer. When models are standardized, the support team can keep identical replacement hardware on hand for quick fixes. They can swap in an identical memory stick or GPU if yours has glitches. They can even swap entire machines by moving the hard drive. Having non-standard machines greatly increases this cost for companies with more than, say, 6 developers. And of course standard hardware typically means a volume discount and a significant support agreement with Dell, or HP, or Apple, or whoever else.

Let's also not forget that when developers are choosing their own machines, they're doing so on company time. It's certainly not cost effective to have developers doing comparison shopping on machines. And it's absolutely not cost effective to have developers putting together their own machines from parts (as some would happily do if allowed).

There are certainly benefits to having everyone upgrade at the same time, though. From a technical standpoint, it seems better to have everyone on the same setup so that you only have to deal with the same set of problems. You might also be able to get a deal for buying in bulk.

Additionally, it would be frustrating to use your credits too soon and then the guy next to you gets something twice as good one month later. So just play it safe by keeping everyone on the same playing field.

Or suddenly all the machines in the office are bluescreening at the same obscure graphics driver bug and nobody can do any work...

I've pitched this idea before, and the standard argument is that by doing something like this, you lose the tax benefits around capital expenditures that become depreciating assets.

However, I'm sure the tax benefit is small compared to the potential for increased productivity and output. But try explaining that to the average CFO.

But that would give up the really good dell discount for buying 30 identical machines.

As a father of two, I heart this idea. This takes the budgeting headache away from the manager, and is completely fair.

It implies that every developer is responsible for his/her own workstation maintenance, though, and that might be a risk/pain you don't want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com