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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

> pre-built is a must. We are not allowed to use grant money to buy all the parts and assemble ourselves, which would have been my preferred option

Huh. Why? This seems arbitrary.

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Because if you assemble yourself, and it doesn't turn on, it's your job to debug which part is failing. If you buy pre-build you get a warranty for the whole thing.

We had some people at work buy parts and it was fine for a while, then became a nightmare, unstable machines where we could never figure out what part was to blame. It isn't worth paying Dev's salaries to let them debug their faulty hardware.

I spent probably $20k on labor costs alone to order 4 developer laptops for my team when I worked for the U.S. Navy.

Procurement rules often exist for good reasons, but they're one of the reasons I moved back to the private sector.

Apologies for my ignorance, but can you describe it to me in practical terms what does it exactly mean to spend $20k on labor costs just to order 4 developer laptops, please?

Soliciting multiple bids, getting exceptions to normal computer procurement rules, navigating the other more mainstream rules, and some other stuff, IIRC.

Happily it was a while ago and I purged most of the details from my brain.

That's the number of hours it took to do all of the paperwork necessary for the acquisition, times the hourly rates charged to the government (as a general rule for USG cost-plus contracts, 1.5x the developer salary to cover benefits, contractor overhead, etc.) by the people doing the paperwork.

The one I remember best from when I was working gov't contractors was that there were forms that certified we were currently complying with all current US trade embargoes and sanctions regimes. So we had to investigate and make sure that we were complying with them all- the State department has a searchable list of all the people and companies that are under various levels of sanctions. But that paperwork, times all of the other forms we had to fill out, times a competitive bidding process (with possibility for appeals) to make sure the government wasn't getting ripped off, etc.

This can happen in the private industry as well: I remember once seeing a whole bunch of level 2 managers in a conference room battling it out over exactly which laptop to buy for ~15 developers who needed special extra beefy hardware for a project, and commenting to my L1 manager that the price difference between the two laptops was less than the cost to the company of that meeting, so it would have been wiser to just buy the more expensive laptops and forget the argument.

It often is arbitrary. Also, the rules as enforced by the awardee institution often differ from the funding agency's written rules. The people who are responsible for reviewing purchasing are only responsible for making sure no rules are broken, not with producing anything, so they tend to interpret the rules conservatively and just say "no" if they're not sure. The IT department also may try to block anything they didn't pick even if the funding agency would allow it. (Speaking from experience with university bureaucracy.)

It's not out of concern for cost-benefit ratio (overhead from parts selection and assembly) or anything like that. Getting something useful done is solely the researcher's problem.

How much time is spent choosing and assembling parts? The less time you spend on tasks like that the more valuable time spent on something useful. (or so it is assumed)

because the bean counters track assets, which means computers, not various parts.

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