Hardware woes - cheap companies don't make sense!
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I once worked at a place that on purpose paid more money to get 30 gig hard drives instead of 50 gig. And the drives had the same specs for speed and cache size etc. Thanks guys, guess we'll do make do with less at your expense.... for no reason X|
Kill some time, play my game Hop Cheops[^]
The reason might be for emissions compliance. Changing a component may require retesting, depending upon the regulatory conditions you're trying to meet. That retesting can be time-consuming and expensive, so companies try to keep hardware configurations constant.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
So I'm sitting here surfing and playing online dominoes, waiting for this piece of crap six year old laptop to compile. When my last one died in December, they sent me a 10% slower one. They won't give us new hardware, but complain when they realize it takes 20 minutes to compile (and thus we don't get enough done). I have a stellar new super fast personal desktop sitting six inches from the laptop, playing dominoes while the laptop compiles. Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN. And we've already signed over $45 million on contracts this fiscal year, still in Q2. I guess their motto is: "We won’t give you adequate tools, nor let you bring your own!"
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I once worked at a place that on purpose paid more money to get 30 gig hard drives instead of 50 gig. And the drives had the same specs for speed and cache size etc. Thanks guys, guess we'll do make do with less at your expense.... for no reason X|
Kill some time, play my game Hop Cheops[^]
That reminds of a small college were I worked for a while. When I got there (1989) the labs were full of XT clones with Hercules graphics cards and amber screens -- and they were still buying more even though they were more expensive than newer systems with color.
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So I'm sitting here surfing and playing online dominoes, waiting for this piece of crap six year old laptop to compile. When my last one died in December, they sent me a 10% slower one. They won't give us new hardware, but complain when they realize it takes 20 minutes to compile (and thus we don't get enough done). I have a stellar new super fast personal desktop sitting six inches from the laptop, playing dominoes while the laptop compiles. Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN. And we've already signed over $45 million on contracts this fiscal year, still in Q2. I guess their motto is: "We won’t give you adequate tools, nor let you bring your own!"
[A] A1. Find out who IT reports to. A2. Try to get into a casual conversation, where you mention that as an workplace annoyance, you don't understand totally oblivious to the fact that they could actually change something
[B] B1. Deal with a project manager - ideally, key customer outside the company - that you work for. B2. Log the time spent compiling. Carefully. Ideally, get a script that logs the times. B3. Bring up the topic from time to time with different people. This is just a baseline defense, almost a decoy. B4. Make sure non-code artifacts (like documentation) are defensibly good enough. B5. When some shit hits the fan and the head honchos are fuming that some customer deadline was not met, or is in danger, or features have to be cut, whip out your drive- the-bullet-home chart of time wasted waiting for the compiler.
[C] Get Xoreax[^] or a similar tool approved
FILETIME to time_t
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
So I'm sitting here surfing and playing online dominoes, waiting for this piece of crap six year old laptop to compile. When my last one died in December, they sent me a 10% slower one. They won't give us new hardware, but complain when they realize it takes 20 minutes to compile (and thus we don't get enough done). I have a stellar new super fast personal desktop sitting six inches from the laptop, playing dominoes while the laptop compiles. Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN. And we've already signed over $45 million on contracts this fiscal year, still in Q2. I guess their motto is: "We won’t give you adequate tools, nor let you bring your own!"
Well, There is no reason to give you access to all of the source code. It sounds to me as if your company needs to hire a systems administrator that is experienced with setting up a build server. I would suggest that the management at your company take a look at the Team Foundation Server[^] package. Put it on a 16 core server with 32GB RAM and watch your compile time drop to < 1 minute. If there are more than a dozen software engineers in your group then the company recovers the cost of the server via increased production. Plus... the coffee pot uses slightly less energy due to less wait time. :-D The software is optional... you could actually use a half dozen batch scripts to automate the build process and report the results to the engineering group over http. System administrators these days seem to be less skilled in my opinion... many of them are just guys that have a dozen certifications and no real-world experience. I've written dozens of batch files and command line applications at the request of various systems administrators over the years. I come from a Unix background... and back then systems administrators were also software engineers and we worked every day from within the C shell[^]. Most systems administrators today can't even write a simple batch script. But yet... they have a beautiful graph of the network topology for the weekly meetings and some outstanding power point presentations of the new and improved domain/group policy. Best Wishes, -David Delaune
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dexterama wrote:
Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN.
If you put the source on your system and compile it, and then remove the source from your system, who's going to know? :cool:
See if you can crack this: b749f6c269a746243debc6488046e33f
So far, no one seems to have cracked this!The unofficial awesome history of Code Project's Bob! "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
We all will now ;P
Failure is not an option; it's the default selection.
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View it as a retirement benefit. Once you retire all that dominoes practice will pay off at the old folks home.
There's always a silver lining?
VS2010/Atmel Studio 6.0 ToDo Manager Extension
Version 3.0 now available. -
The reason might be for emissions compliance. Changing a component may require retesting, depending upon the regulatory conditions you're trying to meet. That retesting can be time-consuming and expensive, so companies try to keep hardware configurations constant.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary - where did that come from? Sounds spurious... in the real world, it's more group stupidity.
Charlie Gilley You're going to tell me what I want to know, or I'm going to beat you to death in your own house. "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Gary - where did that come from? Sounds spurious... in the real world, it's more group stupidity.
Charlie Gilley You're going to tell me what I want to know, or I'm going to beat you to death in your own house. "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I'm not directly involved, since I'm a software guy. We've had grief in the past with both U.S. and EU compliance issues from changing minor items. It's stupid, but some of it depends on what you document as a FRU (Field Replacable Unit). For a while we documented the hard drive in the industrial PC we use as a FRU, so when we changed models or sizes, we had to do some retesting. I think we've since switched to treating the entire PC as a FRU, since that's what most of the service guys yank and replace anyway.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
So I'm sitting here surfing and playing online dominoes, waiting for this piece of crap six year old laptop to compile. When my last one died in December, they sent me a 10% slower one. They won't give us new hardware, but complain when they realize it takes 20 minutes to compile (and thus we don't get enough done). I have a stellar new super fast personal desktop sitting six inches from the laptop, playing dominoes while the laptop compiles. Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN. And we've already signed over $45 million on contracts this fiscal year, still in Q2. I guess their motto is: "We won’t give you adequate tools, nor let you bring your own!"
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Thanks - got a similar story here. This machine has 2GB running XP and is MF (mega frustrating). 5-10 minutes per compile/link/run (web app) cycle ... Makes no sense, given the hourly rate they're paying me. I think I'll take up dominoes.
If they pay you by the hour, then that compiling time is like an extra bonus :)
Edgar Prieto Software Engineer
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If they pay you by the hour, then that compiling time is like an extra bonus :)
Edgar Prieto Software Engineer
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I once worked at a place that on purpose paid more money to get 30 gig hard drives instead of 50 gig. And the drives had the same specs for speed and cache size etc. Thanks guys, guess we'll do make do with less at your expense.... for no reason X|
Kill some time, play my game Hop Cheops[^]
thrakazog wrote:
I once worked at a place that on purpose paid more money to get 30 gig hard drives instead of 50 gig. And the drives had the same specs for speed and cache size etc. Thanks guys, guess we'll do make do with less at your expense.... for no reason X|
But haven't you heard the old management maxim? Less is more!
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I'm not directly involved, since I'm a software guy. We've had grief in the past with both U.S. and EU compliance issues from changing minor items. It's stupid, but some of it depends on what you document as a FRU (Field Replacable Unit). For a while we documented the hard drive in the industrial PC we use as a FRU, so when we changed models or sizes, we had to do some retesting. I think we've since switched to treating the entire PC as a FRU, since that's what most of the service guys yank and replace anyway.
Software Zen:
delete this;Ahhh, light bulb comes on. I understand your perspective now (as soon as you said FRU).
Charlie Gilley You're going to tell me what I want to know, or I'm going to beat you to death in your own house. "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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So I'm sitting here surfing and playing online dominoes, waiting for this piece of crap six year old laptop to compile. When my last one died in December, they sent me a 10% slower one. They won't give us new hardware, but complain when they realize it takes 20 minutes to compile (and thus we don't get enough done). I have a stellar new super fast personal desktop sitting six inches from the laptop, playing dominoes while the laptop compiles. Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN. And we've already signed over $45 million on contracts this fiscal year, still in Q2. I guess their motto is: "We won’t give you adequate tools, nor let you bring your own!"
.... Your development machine must be sufficient enough to maximize productivity. Show your company some estimates of the amount of time wasted compiling code, compared to how fast a quality machine could do it. You can probably very easily demonstrate that a $1,000 investment in a better desktop saves them money in at least one year. I see you have a laptop, nothing precludes you from having a nice desktop that you can remote into from that laptop. You need a better machine dude, it will make life better for everyone at your company and your customers, not just yourself. Get your company to understand that.
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So I'm sitting here surfing and playing online dominoes, waiting for this piece of crap six year old laptop to compile. When my last one died in December, they sent me a 10% slower one. They won't give us new hardware, but complain when they realize it takes 20 minutes to compile (and thus we don't get enough done). I have a stellar new super fast personal desktop sitting six inches from the laptop, playing dominoes while the laptop compiles. Company policy says I cannot put their source code on my system, nor put my system on their VPN. And we've already signed over $45 million on contracts this fiscal year, still in Q2. I guess their motto is: "We won’t give you adequate tools, nor let you bring your own!"
If this employer pays you a good wage for sitting around waiting form your code to compile, then smile and take their money unitl you find something better. If they aren't paying you well, and they give you crap computers (yeah, six years old is crap), then clearly they don't value your contribution very highly. Betcha your work environment is distracting and unpleasant. Such a company will not hesitate to dump you the moment their needs change because they don't respect you. If this is the kind of company you work for, best get your resume updated and get out there in the job market.
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I once worked at a place that on purpose paid more money to get 30 gig hard drives instead of 50 gig. And the drives had the same specs for speed and cache size etc. Thanks guys, guess we'll do make do with less at your expense.... for no reason X|
Kill some time, play my game Hop Cheops[^]
At one of my former employers paid twice what we thought we could have gotten the computers for. We couldn't figure out why we were paying so much until it got leaked the hardware manager was financially involved with the company we were buying from. This was somehow accepted behavior from the executive group. Time and again we found financial ties by one executive or another to the products that were being purchased. Besides their exorbitant pay, they contrived to find other ways to siphon off company cash. I loved the company dinner at which I managed to get seated at the "A" table with the Vice President and his wife. She let it slip that they had been considering using the restaurant for the after wedding rehearsal for their daughter's wedding. I had been wondering why we been having the dinner at all, since it didn't co-inside with accomplishment at work. Great when you can use the company's dime for personal reasons.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Well, There is no reason to give you access to all of the source code. It sounds to me as if your company needs to hire a systems administrator that is experienced with setting up a build server. I would suggest that the management at your company take a look at the Team Foundation Server[^] package. Put it on a 16 core server with 32GB RAM and watch your compile time drop to < 1 minute. If there are more than a dozen software engineers in your group then the company recovers the cost of the server via increased production. Plus... the coffee pot uses slightly less energy due to less wait time. :-D The software is optional... you could actually use a half dozen batch scripts to automate the build process and report the results to the engineering group over http. System administrators these days seem to be less skilled in my opinion... many of them are just guys that have a dozen certifications and no real-world experience. I've written dozens of batch files and command line applications at the request of various systems administrators over the years. I come from a Unix background... and back then systems administrators were also software engineers and we worked every day from within the C shell[^]. Most systems administrators today can't even write a simple batch script. But yet... they have a beautiful graph of the network topology for the weekly meetings and some outstanding power point presentations of the new and improved domain/group policy. Best Wishes, -David Delaune
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The reason might be for emissions compliance. Changing a component may require retesting, depending upon the regulatory conditions you're trying to meet. That retesting can be time-consuming and expensive, so companies try to keep hardware configurations constant.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Oh man, that was funny. I'm still wiping my eyes! Team Foundation Server. Wooo, I'm gonna still be laughing for another 5 minutes.
Heh, I am glad that you found it amusing. I assume that you are a SCM probably using subversion or GIT repositories. There are some great alternatives out there to the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. I am using both subversion and GIT in various open source projects to which I contribute. So which do you personally use? Best Wishes, -David Delaune
