Hardware woes - cheap companies don't make sense!
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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:
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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