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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

No doubt the math checks out, but I wonder if developer productivity can be quantified that easily. I believe there's a lot of research pointing to people having a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive capacity available per day, and that aligns well with my personal experience. A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process.

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Your brain tends to do better if you can stay focused on your task for consecutive, though not indefinite, periods of time. This varies from person to person, and depends on how long a build/run/test takes. But the challenge for many is that 'break' often becomes a context switch, a potential loss of momentum, and worse may open me up to a distraction rather than a productive use of my time.

For me, personally, a better break is one I define on my calendar and helps me defragment my brain for a short period of time before re-engaging.

I recommend investigating the concept of 'deep work' and drawing your own conclusions.

>"A lot of times, waiting for the computer to finish feels like a micro-break that saves up energy for my next deep thought process."

As an ISV I buy my own hardware so I do care about expenses. I can attest that to me waiting for computer to finish feels like a big irritant that can spoil my programming flow. I take my breaks whenever I feel like and do not need a computer to help me. So I pay for top notch desktops (within reason of course).

There’s also the time to market and bureaucracy cost. I took over a place where there was a team of people devoted making sure you had exactly what PC you need.

Configuring devices more generously often lets you get some extra life out of it for people who don’t care about performance. If the beancounters make the choice, you’ll buy last years hardware at a discount and get jammed up when there’s a Windows or application update. Saving money costs money because of the faster refresh cycle.

My standard for sizing this in huge orgs is: count how many distinct applications launch per day. If it’s greater than 5-7, go big. If it’s less, cost optimize with a cheaper config or get the function on RDS.

Also worth factoring in that top-spec hardware will have a longer usable life, especially for non-power users.

This is true, but I find my train of thought slips away if I have to wait more than a handful of seconds, let alone two minutes.

Tying this back to your point, those limited hours of focus time come in blocks, in my experience, and focus time is not easily "entered", either.

One person's micro breaks are another person's disruption of flow state

Simple estimates work surprisingly well for a lot of things because a lot of the 'unquantifiable' complexity being ignored behaves like noise. When you have dozens of factors pulling in different directions—some developers multitask better, some lose flow more easily, some codebases are more memory-hungry, and so on—it all tends to just average out, and the result is reasonably accurate. Accurate enough that it's useful data to make a decision with, at least.

That sounds reasonable, but there are also factors pulling in the opposite direction, for example Wirth's Law [1], that suggests devs with powerful computers create inefficient software.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

For me the issue is at work with 16gb of ram, I'm basically always running into swap and having things grind to a halt. My personal workstation has 64gb and the only time I experience issues is when something's leaking memory

Well depends what kind of time periods you're talking. I've seen one in the past that was 60 minutes vs. 20 minutes (for a full clean compile, but often that is where you find yourself) - that is far more than a micro-break, that is a big chunk of time wasted.

You’re not waiting for the end of a thing though. You might hope you are, but the truth is there’s always one little thing you still have to take care of. So until the last build is green and the PR is filed, you’re being held hostage by the train of thought that’s tied to this unit of work. Thinking too much about the next one just ends up adding time to this one.

You’re a grownup. You should know when to take a break and that’ll be getting away from the keyboard, not just frittering time waiting for a slow task to complete.

The hours I sometimes spend waiting on a build are time that won't come back latter. Sometimes I've done other tasks but I can only track so much and so often it isn't worth it.

a faster machine can get me to productive work faster.

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