Investments in your work equipment/tools, what would you expect?
-
$5k would be 5% of your $100k salary, not 1%. Just sayin'.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
-
If you are employed as a programmer in a company, how much money relative to your salary is justified for work equipment such as computers? Licenses for tools excluded, as a programmer you simply depend on certain tools. From my point of view, I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating? Thank you in advance.
0x01AA wrote:
I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating?
That ratio would taper off the future up you go, for a dev at least, if you include stock options, etc. at a FAANG company. If you're talking base, gross salary then that seems on par for a salaried employee until you reach a threshold. Which I'll say the number is privately, but those talented few who know... know. I've seen some companies push cheapo laptops on a contractor though. But, if it's cheapo company and you're an employee, your salary probably sucks too. So, 1% holds. :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon
-
I don't think of it that way. But I will say that both "too little" and "too much" are to be avoided. One of my past employers -- to some extent -- spent "too much". In one case declaring that all ETL developers (such as I) were to use a particular tool -- the most expensive one available -- even though SSIS was paid for (included with SQL Server) and did everything we needed it to. They also bought each developer an MSDN subscription, which we didn't need. Knowing that an employer is willing to pay for what a developer asks for is good, but buying what the developer didn't request is a waste of money. Also the general observation that many things which are "free" are often not worth the price.
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I don't think of it that way.
Totally tangential side note, but the wealthy think in percentages. It's the poor/middle class that refuse to. It's actually very smart to think in percents as that changes much less frequently than inflation rates.
Jeremy Falcon
-
0x01AA wrote:
I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer.
I went and did the calculation. I did My_Annual_Salary * 0.01 (That's the calculation, right?) I don't want to reveal my salary but this would mean that the company had to spend $10,000 on my computer. That seems like an awful lot for the company to spend on my computer each year. :rolleyes:
raddevus wrote:
I don't want to reveal my salary but this would mean that the company had to spend $10,000 on my computer.
See, I told you it would pay off to start male dancing. :laugh: :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon
-
raddevus wrote:
My_Annual_Salary * 0.01 ...company had to spend $10,000 on my computer. ...spend on my computer each year.
Wow! Congrats man! I put two and two together to figure out you have a 7-digits salary. In my neck of the woods you ain't gonna find many developers getting that. Either that, or you missed a zero in your computations :laugh:
Mircea
He's joking; it was only $978,942. And wealthy people don't get paid in salary like that (at a job) because it's worst possible tax structure.
Jeremy Falcon
-
If you are employed as a programmer in a company, how much money relative to your salary is justified for work equipment such as computers? Licenses for tools excluded, as a programmer you simply depend on certain tools. From my point of view, I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating? Thank you in advance.
-
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I don't think of it that way.
Totally tangential side note, but the wealthy think in percentages. It's the poor/middle class that refuse to. It's actually very smart to think in percents as that changes much less frequently than inflation rates.
Jeremy Falcon
I wasn't dissing percentages themselves, but the comparison of percentages, which is fraught with peril. Which is pretty much what I was saying, though not very clearly perhaps.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
the poor/middle class
Well, it's not a matter of class. The less educated of whichever class are easily swayed by misuse of statistics -- percentages, graphs, etc.
-
I wasn't dissing percentages themselves, but the comparison of percentages, which is fraught with peril. Which is pretty much what I was saying, though not very clearly perhaps.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
the poor/middle class
Well, it's not a matter of class. The less educated of whichever class are easily swayed by misuse of statistics -- percentages, graphs, etc.
Oh snap. :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon
-
Ok, ok; maybe an upper limit sould be set ;P But on the other hand, if you earn that much, why the tools you use to earn that, should not be in a relation. [Edit] Or are you a banker-CEO whose income has nothing to do with the work done. And work done, usually requires tools, except for banker-CEOs of course ;P
0x01AA wrote:
why the tools you use to earn that, should not be in a relation.
I think that's the main fallacy with your thesis. If two workers are performing the same job, it is reasonable to expect them to use the same tools/equipment regardless of how much they are paid to do it or how much the company earns from it. For the higher-paid worker, this would be a smaller percentage of income, but such a worker shouldn't complain about it. This is one of the problems inherent in trying to compare percentages.
-
No sorry, but for $2K you get only something simple from my point of view. I like to have 64GB memory for Windows and VS. I like also to have another 64GB of memory for let's say 8 VMs. And of course 1TB SSD ;)
If you have a real day to day need for 8 VMs then I would expect you to need more than 1TB for storage. Although not sure why you need 8 VMs day to day. Only reason I can think of is a Microservice Architecture which is not actually keeping the interfaces between each Microservice clean. Thus requiring frequent multi-service debug sessions. And if that is the case then better if the company spend money on fixing that.
-
If you are employed as a programmer in a company, how much money relative to your salary is justified for work equipment such as computers? Licenses for tools excluded, as a programmer you simply depend on certain tools. From my point of view, I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating? Thank you in advance.
Wind the clock back to, let's say the late 1970s. We were earning on the order of $10/hr, $20k a year. Main memory (core in those days, 2.6uS cycle time!) we were celebrating coming down to $1/byte.* The rule of thumb then was that overheads - office/lab space, equipment, etc - ran at 2 x salary. One new hire at $20k meant $60k or more in the department budget. *Explains my empathy for those working with constrained resources, like @code-witch. Old brain-wiring dies hard.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
-
If you are employed as a programmer in a company, how much money relative to your salary is justified for work equipment such as computers? Licenses for tools excluded, as a programmer you simply depend on certain tools. From my point of view, I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating? Thank you in advance.
Why some calculated value? You should have the tools you need to do your job to the best of your ability. I have a Raspberry Pi. Pico. :)
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
-
Why some calculated value? You should have the tools you need to do your job to the best of your ability. I have a Raspberry Pi. Pico. :)
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
I agree; my question wasn't really asked correctly (I'm not a native English speaker ;) ). What I wanted to ask: If an employee 'has to' get a new computer after 5 years (because IT requires it!), one shouldn't be petty and buy the cheapest one. One should invest a reasonable amount. Well, I guess I'm still failing at expressing myself in English ;)
-
I agree; my question wasn't really asked correctly (I'm not a native English speaker ;) ). What I wanted to ask: If an employee 'has to' get a new computer after 5 years (because IT requires it!), one shouldn't be petty and buy the cheapest one. One should invest a reasonable amount. Well, I guess I'm still failing at expressing myself in English ;)
You do fine. I understood the gist of your question. I was a little flip. My thought is that a junior programmer and a senior programmer have pretty much the same needs as far as writing code goes, so salary is not necessarily the best basis for computers. OTOH, I had a client who sold part of their business. Fast Internet was not available there. The new company came into their new employees site, removed all the computers and put in terminals that used the home office server for all processing. That over ADSL. Really interesting when the database is 4 states away over a slow network. I worked in a corporate environment where the lead architect got the blunderbuss-8 system and the main coder got the SX system. That didn't go well either. Devs should get what they need, but sometime budgets get in the way. Back to my Pi :)
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
-
If you are employed as a programmer in a company, how much money relative to your salary is justified for work equipment such as computers? Licenses for tools excluded, as a programmer you simply depend on certain tools. From my point of view, I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating? Thank you in advance.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but this makes no sense. For me, all I need is a laptop to do my work, let's say a good one costs me €2000. I buy a mouse, keyboard and good monitor. I don't want to reconnect cables every day so I buy a docking station. All in all another €1000. That's a lot of money, so maybe I can set up a same setup at home as well for that money. So for €3000 I've got everything and that will last me at least five years. After five years I'd probably need to replace only the laptop, so let's say all in all it'll cost you about €500 a year. Now here's the neat part, you're employed so your company should provide you with all those tools. I have a very small business and €3000 is a very small five-yearly investment with the current rates for programmers. After taxes that's still only like a €2000 investment, if even that. As for licences, many companies have free licenses for small teams, students, etc. Like the Visual Studio and SQL Server Community Editions. So you can use those at home, or if you need tools for work, guess what: your employer should provide them. So I guess the answer to your question is 0%.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
