Summary

I recently worked with a client who is building out a development team of roughly 10 people for a technically focused big-data / AI startup. While they mostly brought me in to look at cloud vs self hosting options for hardware for training ANN’s, I also ended up getting involved in quite a wide discussion on what hardware they should be buying for the developers.

Strategies

We came to the conclusion that there are three primary options for this.

1. Give every developer a stipend, and allow them to buy what they want.
2. Give everyone the same hardware, and specify that hardware.
3. Creating an “internal shop”, as a hybrid of option 1 and 2.

While I am a big fan of the first option, I understand this isn’t something for every organisation, and it wasn’t an option here. Here is where I feel like organisations often make significant failings. This company were hiring and experienced engineers, and would be paying in the order of €6,000 to €10,000 per month on salaries alone for them, let alone all the other costs of employing staff.

Computing Hardware

The initial plan called for buying developer laptops costing around €1,300. These were Dell XPS 13 machines, with mostly default choices. Upgrading the memory from 8GB to 32GB, and upgrading the SSD from 512GB to 2TB cost a total of around €600, or around 2 days of what you would pay these engineers.

There are so many advantages to giving technical staff good quality equipment.

• Whenever the computer is the slow point, people can get distracted and productivity will decline.
• Things like compiling can actually be slow. I have felt like this XKCD Cartoon even recently while working on some large rust codebases.
• Snappier user experiences in large repos for tools like LSP’s just make everything feel nicer to use.
• The engineers feel valued when you give them nice tools !

So, while it is easy to look at something like 10 x €600 = €6000 and see that real cost, I’d advise everyone buying equipment for engineers to really consider if that saving will be worth it in the long run.

Communications Hardware

In these days with more remote work, even if you are in an office you might need to communicate with people that are not, as well as with suppliers, customers etc. Tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom are common place.

While it may be tempting to work simply use a laptops builtin webcam, and supply a cheap headset I also consider this to be a false economy. Looking good and more importantly even, sounding good, has several important benefits.

1. Less repeating things due to poor communications.
2. You look considerably more professional to external people.
3. People are quicker to reach for audiovisual communications if they are good experiences.

I’d recommend buying a quality wireless headset to allow people to get up and move around while on calls, and a reasonable external webcam so things aren’t tied to using a laptop camera, and laptop cameras are usually quite low quality as well. My personal recommendations are a Logitech Bri500 webcam, and something like a Lenovo Go headset.

Conclusions

Spending your companies money wisely is very important, but consider the value you get when doing so. Is buying cheap equipment for expensive employees a false economy ?. At least consider and rule out higher end equipment rather than defaulting to buying the cheapest option that statisfies the functional requirements, without considering the non-functionals.