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Comment by thinkmassive | Hacker News Reader

- underpowered hardware

At my previous job I requested an upgrade from a 3 year-old laptop. Initially they approved it, but before ordering one they reversed and denied my request. The justification was they'd spent too much outfitting new hires and it was no longer in the budget, despite my request coming long before the interview process started for the new hires. To make it worse, the new hires were entry level and I had the second longest tenure at the company (~90 people).

Now I work somewhere that happily provides every technical employee with the latest maxed out hardware. The difference in amount of work accomplished is staggering.

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I'm doing development work on a 5 year old laptop with 4GB of RAM. I constantly have performance issues, so I put in a request to bring me up to 8GB of RAM at a cost of $73. My manager says "is it really worth it if you're getting a new machine in four months?"

Well, I guess that just depends on how productive you expect me to be over the next quarter.

Can someone with more business knowledge than me explain this?

Like... you'll pay a developer $100 an hour, but then you ask them to spend an hour in a meeting to justify the purchase of a $50 widget that will save them an hour a day for the next year.

There must be some twisted logic at work, but I don't see it.

I've been in situations where it basically boils down to hierarchy and reinforcement of the status quo. I once had a request for a new laptop refused because it would've meant mine was newer than the president/owner's machine and that wasn't tolerable to the corporate ego.

I think a big factor to this is the mindset of the culture - if it's a "We're in this together" culture, I'm sure the CEO wouldn't mind.

The question then becomes, is it a secretary/manager/ceo complaining about things 'not being fair' or is it simply that no one was ever asked and IT ended up making a decision on their own? Sometimes decisions left unspoken end up causing a kind of solidification by accident.

I find the biggest cause is that IT ends up being silo'd off (or being an MSP/corporate branch) so they aren't in touch with the workplace's culture and assume its one of petty ego.

Another factor can be that many of these decisions are looked through the eyes of the company's stock and that causes a sort of myopia regarding short-term costs vs long term gain.

Both of these end up being nasty feedback cycles and can be impossible to break once it becomes status quo.

I'm guessing these people aren't in a developed country. I could imagine that happening in India.

Companies often create blanket policies on spending approval that might even make sense for parts of the organization but don't leave room for common sense.

They might need to categorize all expenses as capex vs opex, etc.

The department has no chance to avoid paying that $100, but they do have a chance to avoid paying the $50.

Yet that $100 could have been spent on actually getting things done instead of spending $100 to save $50. I'm not sure that I understand your logic here.

Makes management feel useful. They can tick off some boxes, and feel like they contributed to the process somehow.

I am sure I would be way more effective without my managers. Prioritization would be somewhat different, but many of the day to day problems that hinder me being properly productive would have gone by now.

Same for me : my dev pc has a 6 y.o. AthlonX64 with 4GB RAM, which force me to have a second pc to only run Lotus on it ! Six months ago, my manager ask to upgrade my workstation for the standard build provided by the IT dept, with some modifications in order to lessen the cost (the standard conf cost like 2k, while his was 700$). And he was replied : "your conf costs too much, here is a 400$ conf with an i3 core". He said then : "Fuck it, we'll take the 2000$ standard dev build then".

In reply to the top post, I would add the following task delayer : - supplier unreliability

We order a server from a major manufactoring company, which had a faulty PCI bus (well hardware defaults happen). They took 6 months and 5 differents motherboards to ship us the same exact configuration we initially payed for !

> The difference in amount of work accomplished is staggering.

It's a shame this isn't more obvious. I was recently given an old laptop at work as well. So old, that it took 7+ seconds from the time I clicked "Inspect Element" in Chrome for the window to open. It was weeks before a purchase for RAM was made.

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