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Comment by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh | Hacker News Reader

Makes you wonder what would happen if companies occasionally did the exact opposite to their engineers.

"Oh, you know that 32 GB machine you've got? We're replacing it with this new 16 GB one. If the test suite is too slow on your new machine, I guess you'll just have to make the tests faster."

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What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.

You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build. Windows Vista devs with 8GB of DDR2 when real world customers had 512mb of DDR learned this lesson hard.

EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.

> You having fun/ being able to develop fast isn't your customer's problem/ the problem's of people actually using the things you build.

I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?

If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.

>I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?

Basically: An end-user has computer with 4GB of DDR3. Devs for <software> wrote for and tested on a machine with 64GB of DDR5. <Software> ends up running like shit on end-user's computer.

It isn't the end-user's problem that the software runs like shit, because the devs programmed to an unrealistic common denominator. The end-user is going to find <software> that doesn't run like shit on his computer, and the devs only have themselves to blame for losing a customer because they were so out of tune with reality.

> It isn't the end-user's problem that the software runs like shit

It may not be their fault but it almost certainly is their problem…

Tell me you've never developed native applications outside an iOS simulator, or OS development without telling me...

Do you actually have something to add to the discussion? Or you just want to take potshots at me?

You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.

You can write your code on a nice fast machine. A dev machine should be as fast as possible. Those devs with their big fast machines should be required to run and test on much lower spec machines though.

Testing only in a VM on a beefy dev box leads to terribly performing software on customer machines. There's a multitude of performance problems that only come up when a system starts paging to disk, a machine has a HDD, or a CPU gets maxed out. These issues will be completely occulted on a dev machine with tons of RAM, 16 cores, and an NVMe disk.

Far too many developers have the beefy dev box with no requirements to test on more prosaic configurations. Even limiting a VM's CPU and memory isn't a good environment for performance testing because it's still faster than actual low end hardware.

And it can't be cost issue, the crappiest machines are some cheap laptops from any big box retailer. Okay, that fact itself might make getting them harder, but still. Just buy a once a year a low few hundred euro laptop and add to pile. Rotate in 5-10 years or as they fail.

Preach my friend

Yes, I started this discussion thread you're responding to. No, there isn't really a way to do native development without experiencing what your customers do. Build locally on the high powered one, run on your lower spec'd machine. This isn't a potshot. This is me being annoyed that 15 years later, people keep making the same mistakes of not testing on "real world" hardware. Your VM isn't a real user representation. Stop thinking so.

I think the problem is the either or nature. One dev one box is a mistake. The team should have a few they share.

In particular I often fight the slowest machine leaving the office. That should stay for a long time, set aside for testing.

It's a matter of tact. They could say, "Here are your 32GB RAM machines. Your old one? You get to keep it too. Make sure Chrome works perfectly on your old machine."

This is how it should go. Not setting the high perf machine as a benchmark.

At least not every engineer. I love using older machines and any chance to make things work in a hardware friendly way.

I have to say, I appreciate the insane expertise browser engine developers have in making JS and layouting run fast.

This is what CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) systems were designed for. If certain tests exceed the performance budget of a low-resource environment in CI/CD, the engineer responsible will be required to fix it before a release can ship.

You’d have less fallout if you just delay giving them upgrades long past the point they are due.

This is what CI can be used for

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