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I would love to have a boss like that 
Thanks & Best Regards,
Umer Aziz Malik
Senior Strategy Developer
Aurora Solutions (Pvt) Ltd.
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I actually find that clever. Most of us programmers are just small nerds inside. Having a big bad computer makes us all warm and fuzzy inside. Hence we get happy and therefore a lot more efficient/constructive.
Hardware costs are nothing compared to the extra development time generated by frustrated programmers (come one, do you really take time to find the best approaches when you have to swear over your computer every day?).
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Absolutely - I guess this was also the idea my boss had. Maybe I should mention that he himself is a programmer - and a nerd. He always has the lates iPad, iPhone, the biggest Mac etc.. And he thinks that if we want to create good code we should have everything we need. And honestly, if you compare the costs of a 27'' Mac with 16GB to the costs of a 'normal' PC you will find room for a lot of memory.
My colleagues are also happy - one has a nice SSD, he compiles now 10 times faster, another one has a second 27'' display attached to his 27'' Mac and so on..
And the result is in deed: We all are happy and have a lot of fun doing our work 
(I used to have such a Mac, but since I do mainly Windows development my boss 'allowed' me to change).
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Its not just the config but the weight of laptops matters!
Recently by request few employees upgraded to higher config (than required) machines out of curiosity. And now they leave their laptops at office complaining they are heavy to carry!! 
So possibly, "how much heavy is your laptop?" can be the next poll!!! 
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I agree - that could be fun. Personally I need a small truck to transport my laptop - and a trailer for the power supply which is almost just as heavy as the laptop itself...
I blame myself for wanting 17 inches (screen size that is) - 14 had been more than enough seeing that I'm using an external monitor anyway.
Why can't I be applicable like John? - Me, April 2011
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Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
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Da mihi sis crustum Etruscum cum omnibus in eo!
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Just because a thing is new don’t mean that it’s better - Will Rogers, September 4, 1932
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14" is a good compromise I find, I never understood why you would want to have a laptop bigger than that. It turns it from a laptop into a desktop.
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Get them to delete a few big files, and use smaller fonts. It'll be easier to carry then.
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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Sounds like a great Idea!!
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Just 20 years back, 1GB meant you had that much disk space!
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Seems like only yesterday...
Why can't I be applicable like John? - Me, April 2011
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Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
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Da mihi sis crustum Etruscum cum omnibus in eo!
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Just because a thing is new don’t mean that it’s better - Will Rogers, September 4, 1932
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On the desk right, next to the one I'm sitting right now, sits my first computer and its 4k RAM has been working for 34 years now. My current PC has only 4 million times as much
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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...but that's only because the machine came with it - I would have specified 2GB if I was building it myself instead of buying off the shelf.
Why? So that my machine was the same or lower spec than my customers. If it works well on mine, it will work excellently on theirs...
If your Dev Box is too high a spec, then you assume that the performance you get is what the client will get, and that just ain't always true. Better to find out at the beginning that there is a performance problem (when it is easy to fix) than on delivery!
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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Well said 
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In the ideal world a dev would have at least 2 machines. One proper one for development and a machine for testing, same spec as that of users. That would be more productive.
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I agree with that reasoning for test environments, but not for main dev.
- build time is usually wasted developer time.
- debug builds can be significantly slower than release builds
- most devs today rely on a giganormous tool chain
My main project (re-)builds in about 20 minutes on my office system, 50 minutes on a build machine that has roughly custoemr specs. With a heavily parallelized build, it's hard to use the machine for something else in that time.
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I agree with you - but I don't work on massive projects.
But I'd expect a project of that size to be a team build, and to have a dedicated test section, which should use equipment slightly lower spec'ed than the end user's.
The problem is the "mine is bigger than yours" attitude of developers means that even for little projects we want Uber-PC at all times, and since the debugger is on the dev machine...
It's a whole lot cheaper to fix performance problems at an early stage then after you hand a near complete project to the customer for initial comments
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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peterchen wrote: builds in about 20 minutes
peterchen wrote: 50 minutes on a build machine
Perhaps its finally time to get rid of that old 486
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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It's a decent two-core Athlon (IIRC), monitoring the repository for changes. It's ok for now - and we are supposed to move to the new servers once they arrive.
Anyway, what I wanted to say: Turnaround times don't matter that much for a build server than for the local dev machines.
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I disagree nothing disturbs me more than a slow development environment that can't keep up with me. I use Virtual Machines to tech down and test my apps.
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I use virtual machines for testing, and need the extra RAM to spin those up in a decent amount of time. The virtual machines only have 2GB RAM to reveal performance issues, but the dev machine has 8GB.
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OriginalGriff wrote: So that my machine was the same or lower spec than my customers
Since I work on the company website and we just got some new servers in a load balanced environment, I guess that means I should have 2 machines, each with 16GB of RAM. I'll put in the request now that you have given me a good reason. 
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Actually I prefer to develop on a high end machine and run a virtual machine inside it to do the first performance tests. That way you can have a more dynamic approach to this issue and have a machine that can withstand time for a few years before dying on you 
V.
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Quote: It's cheap and gives the biggest bang for your buck when developing. Why skimp?
This is one insane utter stupid follow-up for the question 
No developer or admin or manager should/will grant RAM or any other hardware excessively just because they are Cheap 
It all depends on the kind of service/product that the developer is developing.
Developing on too much alien or high end environment (than the target system) may lead to nightmares while testing and deploying
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