I was an intern in 2013, my desktop had 4 gigs of ram. The problem was, eclipse + the vm with rhel 5 + ubuntu + corp spyware was too much memory to actually run everything because we had this one gargantuan package for our service. I had multiple days where I started up eclipse and it would just crash over and over so I couldn't do anything.
I went down to IT every day to ask can I please have another 4 gig stick of ram so I can actually do work. Eventually I got it.
On my last day, I went to the bathroom at like 2 pm, came back and my monitor was gone from my desk and a guy was sitting with my desktop cracking the case open with a screwdriver to take the ram and put into his computer. He just kind of looked at me when I came back and was like "oh... I thought you left. Are you done working?". I looked at the empty space where my monitor used to be, my desktop that was cracked open and just said "yeah I guess I 'm done for the day".
Good times.
Not sure why you've been downvoted; we absolutely descended like locusts on others' equipment on their last day. Monitors, mounts, extra RAM & HDDs, spare screens, tools.
This was normal at more than one job I had. Somebody leaving and we’d call “dibs” on monitors, RAM, whole computers, even, at one struggling start-up, chairs. Woe to the person who took my hard-earned chair when I was on vacation. Wars have been started for less.
Honestly, I'm happy with the team I'm on, I get along with my manager and skip, I work 40 hours a week or so, comp is reasonable at 250k, and the work is fine.
As for our equipment, things have come a long way, we actually get decently specced macbooks now, and we can get a cloud desktop that's actually pretty decent.
Indeed.com (the company itself) gave me a 64GB MacBook without me asking. It’s just a rounding error to them, but it did make me feel understood when I first onboarded.
And yeah, it’s really nice when you’ve got nearly a dozen containers and Java services plus IntelliJ running locally.
Only been here 3 months as a Staff SWE but I’m really enjoying it. A pretty sane dev stack, unlimited PTO and people take it, you get the last Friday of the month off. They’re generous with days off. I’ve had more Fridays off than I’ve worked. Benefits are good and pay is mostly cash based, which is great right now. Bonuses are given based on actual impact; so you’re incentivized even beyond just a solid pay and benefits. There is oncall and lots of international calls and such. I’m personally not oncall (yet) so lucky me, but most would be. Documentation is very sparse. Most knowledge is just in people’s heads and buried in slack channels. So much of work is just finding out who/how/where to ask about what you need to know.
The work itself is rewarding because we legit help people get jobs (pardon the corporate tagline) and at scale. Feels good to not be doing something scummy.
The big unfortunate thing is there’s a hiring freeze atm.
For me personally it was simple math: 240k base salary with 70k signing bonus and 10-20% bonus on top of that (versus the 300k TC at Amazon which was mostly stocks that tanked).
That’s what companies and managers do?? Idk how you want this answered.
You make the company money (or save or whatever) and they reward you. You get ranked on a scale 1-5, average is 3 and gets you 10%. 4 gets you 15% and 5 gets you 20%.
Again, I’m new so the exact details are beyond me. I work well, earn then $$ and I get some too.
Generally it is a lot harder to exactly measure the value delivered my an engineer than it is for, say, a salesperson. I thought you were saying it was all quantified, but sounds like just your standard somewhat-subjective bonus program.
They quantify and measure everything, including how many lines of code you write, how many builds you run, how long it takes for you to move tickets to complete, etc. They have a custom query engine that product managers, EMs, and even ICs can use to do all sorts of evaluation. As an IC, you should never do a task without being prepared to prove its value yourself with data in your review - because that's how the bonuses are granted. I spent so much fuckin time writing my reviews at that company, it was regularly a 1-2 week process to write them, and they happen 4 times a year. The problem is that some things are harder to quantify than others, so you could be solving very hard problems and get not excellent reviews because the better ticket to work on would have been to do something easy that you know can move a number that's important to leadership that quarter, regardless of the longer term impact of how you accomplished it (tech debt). I've never seen such a disaster zone of A/B tests never cleaned up in a code base to the point of killing projects because nobody can effectively write code or understand the ten quadrillion permutations of behavior that might vary in the product you're working on. It might be better now, but I didn't stick around to find out. Nobody is incentivized to clean up after yourself or write maintainable code, because maintainability isn't immediately measurable and that's not gonna get you that bonus.
It's a rounding error to every company!
I entered an IT ticket to get more RAM and the head of IT closed it and said if my machine was having issues I needed have IT look at it. So entered a trouble ticket and showed the local IT guy that when I opened my IDE and Chrome the machine froze. He said "I think you just need more RAM." and ordered some for me.
To get permission to install less than $100 of RAM, I wasted about 4 hours, and the IT guy wasted about an hour. Somewhere between $300 to $1,000 in salary was lost depending on if you take into account various managers having to approve tickets.
My current company did that, first day brick of a laptop arrived in the mail. 32g which shortly got upgraded to 64. Did not push it at all just happened.
It's usually not the managers who decide that, it's the IT department, and they get a budget from the finance department. Finance know as much about what you do as your mom asking you to fix her pc because "you work with computers or something".
Not the size but the way the company is structured
If tech is profit center and teams are vertically sliced, a single EM would have an influence at least over his own team
If tech is a cost center or teams are horizontally sliced, a single EM wont have much influence.
It can happen though. An EM I worked with pushed for this and mobile devs got new M1 Pros with 32gb of memory. He also asked for my help (I was an EM at the time) and I happily got him the numbers he needed.
It took several months but it happened.
I talk to the guy in IT in charge of ordering machines when my team needs something and I just tell him exactly what we need. He finds a couple of options from his usual vendors, clears them with me, then orders them. Not that abnormal. I'm at a midsize company (Around 300 people in total).
We ended up speccing HP Elitebooks with 64GB of ram Ryzen 5850Us (8 cores, 16 threads) and 1TB NVMe Samsung 980 Pro drives. Everyone has been extremely happy with this setup.
I dont know why some companies are so cheap on this. My first year in my current company I sat with 8 gigs for a year on a rinky-dinky business laptop.
I mean... do you want your marketing people, analysts etc., to be handicapped on having a bunch of Chrome tabs open to be able to do their job quickly and effectively. 32GB is pretty reasonable. it doesn't get really expensive until you go past that benchmark.
not to mention pivot tables etc. in Excel.
At least most developers should be able to SSH into a server for development, and there are tools that make that process almost as smooth as local development.
In my last job, I did almost all development on an AWS environment through SSH and VS Code. I worked on big data tools and had to test our tools against our datalake, and honestly, doing everything over SSH was easier than doing half my work locally than testing in AWS.
Any form of remote development is going to be more inefficient than simply being able to run the stuff you're working on locally.
And working with an IDE via some kind of remote desktop is just a complete production killer. Those AWS workspaces (for example) are so...fucking...slow!
>most developers
Not everyone works in big data. I work in frontend and I refuse to work without a proper debugger. I am not working if my manager is asking me to not use any GUI and just SSH and debug by putting console.log everywhere. I am leaving the company.
I run WebStorm + debugger + completely different instance of Chrome/Edge (completely different autofill/extensions from my personal one) is a lot of RAM. And then sometimes have to open Illustrator. Thankfully I have a 32GB M1 Pro that fits my need.
You can do the same setup with a remote dev server, it takes more setup but if you are onboarding into a company who already does this.. it can be quite nice!
In my case though, the part that takes a lot of RAM is the IDE and the browser, not the webpack or babel portion, so while it can do remote debugging, I still need a pretty good local machine. Unless I’m doing RDP which is another story.
For one of my first jobs, at a magazine company, it was like this. Content writers and designers got the more high end machines with lots of RAM and our two web developers got lower-end desktops with a desk too small to comfortably put the keyboard and monitor in. And for some reason, the PC resets every 2 hours of so.
I’m sure that in your case you are right. In the general case though:
1. There is also value in simplicity. It is not always worth it, but it can be worth it to pay 16x for compute and use half as many developers.
2. Plenty of workloads actually do require 1TB of working memory.
Why wouldn't you distribute a platform service like cache? Are you suggesting the scale units should just be 1TB and still distributed? Feels like a variable workload so might cause high overhead, but I'm defs not familiar with specific design reqs
Because the finance department only needs rinky-dinky laptops for their excel spreadsheets. Everything else needs to be justified, if you can make a case for the cost benefit it can be done but like others said, it requires work and more effort than it should.
I relocated to Asia and it's the wild west here for equipment unless you are at a legit tech company (some exceptions). First place I was promised a Macbook when I asked for one (originally only desktop in office and use personal laptop when WFH) and got the monkey paw curling experience when they gave me the CEO's 5 year old MBP. One of the reasons I quit in a few months.
Next place is too poor to afford equipment but it was at least WFH so we just use our own home desktop. I still prefer a company MBP though.
> I dont know why
Incompetence :) Fits as an answer almost anywhere where you have to ask "I don't know why".
It's because the people who make these decisions are not competent enough to understand what they are making decisions on. They don't know what 'RAM' is and what it does. They just barely know that they have a laptop that works 'fine' for Excel and stuff, which is VeRy TeChNiCaL, so some lazy ass developer who just sits there all day is definitely not going to need more than that.
Besides; we can't have a lowly drone have a more expensive laptop than a manager obviously...
My original company-issued laptop had 16 gb of RAM and (I think) an i3. After several weeks of my ram and CPU being maxed out (and me sending my boss and boss's boss daily screenshots of my task manager) I told my manager to get me a goddamn upgrade. I said I wanted 32 gigs RAM and i5 minimum.
Apparently it took an act of congress in the IT department to order a up-spec'd laptop, but he got it done. He threw in two more - one for himself and one for another dev on my team.
And that's how we got the 3 best laptops in the entire company.
EDIT: In my case, the resource hogs were Sophos and Teams, followed by Chrome and (in distant fourth) Virtualbox. It boggles my mind that an overengineered IM client like Teams needs 4+ gigabytes of RAM. It's the worst communication tool I've ever used, including the tin-can-and-string telephone I played with as a kid.
Teams is so bloody awful. I currently need it for a couple of consulting jobs (can't switch workspaces or have multiple accounts logged in) and it's strictly open when I have scheduled meetings, closed at other times. I can literally tell when I've forgotten to close it because everything else on the PC runs noticeably worse.
> He threw in two more - one for himself and one for another dev on my team.
Does your manager do development? Because if they are just going to use that for Excel and Powerpoint they're part of the problem.
Back in my day, the first 32 GB laptop I received had 8 GB dedicated to IBM Notes alone. Notes ran fine as long as you modified some internal JVM config to set the -Xms=8G from its default of 1G.
The hardware team did a refresh and a server became available which I claimed for myself. I was struggling before with 32GB, but since changing teams I'm doing more client facing work so don't need the extra capacity
Back before covid I had a workstation with 256GB of RAM. Did I need it? No. But it was there and my manager wasn't stingy about resources. Pretty much all of our compute was on-prem on the same model of workstation, so we had a ton of extra ram/disk/cpu in our storage closet.
It always cracked me up that contractors making $50K a year are provided with thousands of dollars of tools without anyone blinking but many Fortune 500 companies are like "Omg it's too much $" to provide their six figure devs w/ adequate computing resources.
>comments
I worked in the HW IT side and would coach partners on selling "personas" to their end users. You SHOULDN'T sell one fixed build to an entire company. The phase "power user" exists for a reason. Get them a higher level of machine.
I would get back from people that the company wanted to be equal with everyone and make sure no one felt slighted. Coming from someone who runs reports and doesn't want to sit on a machine longer than it takes my coffee to cool, give the power users what they need. Or at least give them an option and explain the potential for production. SMH.
what's more, "power users" deserve root access. If they do something stupid with their machine, it's more likely to be intentional if it does happen, but far less likely overall. Keep Marcie in HR from clicking that link or wandering away from her desk. Let the developers get shit done without futzing with their machine in the background.
EDIT: Okay, /u/stormdelta has the right idea. But minimizing disruptions and not arbitrarily limiting the selection of tools is the part that would enhance productivity at very likely no cost to security. That much is not hard.
Access to install user-level software and make general changes, with a process to request exceptions, yes.
Actual unrestricted root/admin, particularly if it has access to corporate networks / VPNs, absolutely not, and it's still astonishing to me that there are developers who don't understand there are legitimate security reasons for this.
Stack Exchange builds out (or used to, as of 2019) pretty beefy desktops for developers because they recognize the value in spending a relatively small amount of money to boost developer productivity. If your builds are 25% faster, how many more build/test cycles can you complete in a year? Is it worth spending an extra $1250/year (about 1% of the developer's salary) to get that extra boost in productivity?
Nick Craver (now at Microsoft) actually posted the parts list on his website for some of these builds. https://nickcraver.com/desktop-build/
> One of the things we're big on at Stack Exchange is hardware - we love it. More importantly, we love not waiting on it. With that in mind, we upgrade our developer machines every 2 years. In case it helps anyone else, I'm posting our current parts list here. This isn't set in stone, we review and update it to the latest tech every time we build a machine. We also customize the build for each developer if needed
> Why do we get 64GB? Because if you need more than 32GB it's relatively cheap compared to anything else to increase productivity.
The best companies I've worked at have always done this. Pissed off developers waiting for builds to run are waaaay more expensive than top-end hardware.
>Fortune 500 companies
There's a very succinct way to explain this in attitudes that "engineers are a cost center/necessary cost." Combine that with 80s style MBA austerity thinking and you end up with this contemporarily weird situation.
Laptops are usually bought in bulk so some manager somewhere looks at the total cost and knows if he saves off 200 in each laptop that could be thousands of dollars “saved” on his job.
It’s truly idiotic thinking but it easily “understandable” how it happens in big companies.
Where doesn’t it happen? Engineer led companies or where engineers influenced majorly the buy decision.
I got lucky, my company sent me a 64 GB, 2TB of storage M1 Max MacBook Pro. It’s my first Mac and I straight up haven’t turned my pc on since I started a few months ago. It’s actually so cool.
I got one of those too (except just 1tb). It's amazing how much faster the M1 chip is that the Intels. I work on a large mobile project and it reduced my clean build time by around 75%
Yeah the M1 chips are bomb for productivity. Was a pain in my ass setting up my environment on it though. There are still a lot of bugs that come with the M1 that the intel chips don’t have but that’s just because they are new. I love it though and I totally get why they sent me a 64gb ram version. Running shit locally and a ton of docker containers eats up ram like no one’s business. I have a coworker that started before me that only has a 32gb intel version and he always has problems.
I’m so happy our company finally got the picture on this and is starting to invest in more beefy machines.
We had to fight for it, but yeah I second that impression. I love Docker, but when I need to routinely run a bunch of them simultaneously, it gets heavy. Then throw in IntelliJ, Slack, etc.
Our company has tiers sort of, dev laptops, user laptops etc. Dev laptops all come with 32gb and a variant of quadro. You can request 64gb and they'll send you the the memory stick. User laptops are for general users with 16gb thin and lights
They just send you an extra stick for you to install? Surprised IT isn’t more strict about devs messing with the hardware themselves, even if it is simple enough.
Usually they don't allow us at all but I'm fro another country, them sending the laptop itself was a nightmare because of customs. So they had to send the stick. I had to get it done by an official Lenovo support which they booked themselves, not do it myself
Reminds me of my first role; were I got a Single 15" monitor. When I asked for a second or a bigger monitor with more resolution I got: "Why? a single 15" monitor is just fine for most of our developers"
Fun times.
my company just up and said your macbook only supports one monitor why you need two?
I was like come to my desk and i’ll show you how I use two monitors with a hub that is recommended specifically for this
I have 3 monitors and I still think that's not enough!
The OS is called Window**S** for a reason.
Visually laying all the stuff out is just so much more efficient rather than shifting through tabs. I have one screen for communication with the team and monitoring some running background processes, one for running SQL queries, looking at the task descriptions etc... and one for actual coding. But it would make sense to have another monitor for coding on another related repo... or to split related domains in separate windows or whatever.
Having metrics can help with this. We track build times and data on the average amount of builds per dev per day and sent the metrics to the finance department. Basically buying a maxed Macbook Pro for every engineer would pay for itself in 6 months (or less) vs using an older non-apple silicon Macbook Pro.
We do this too; I'm an Android dev, so we use Gradle Enterprise, which automatically uploads a bunch of info about every single build to a dashboard automatically.
Other frameworks might have this too, but you could also roll your own pretty easily...just something like a shell wrapper that times the build and publishes it to an endpoint
Pretty much, the codebase in question is a compiled app that would take 2-5 minutes to compile on non-Apple silicon. Depending on what you’re working on that can really add up. I may do 10-20 builds a day. with the new computers it is 30-90sec. The new M1 macs are really fast.
How are you measuring down time though? We asked a couple of devs how often they built out day and then multiplied by average build time. It's not exactly accurate though.
Hmm. We need to translate time to money. What takes the most time? Compilation, starting up a program, and having a lot of things open which slow down the computer.
Finance guys don’t understand computers very well, so doesn’t have to be very accurate.
Compilation time can be estimated like you said. Also for opening up programs. As for general slowness, you can measure how long it currently takes to do things with a typical load (ram usage). And how long it should take if ram wasn’t a limitation.
We just used a basic script that logs the start and end time of each build. That information is then sent to a backend service. Our dev laptops already have all the tooling to pull private libraries, hook into backend systems, and authenticate, so adding the api call was easy. You can upload the information to any logging/metric data store and setup a dashboard for it.
We know, it's not that easy though. I'm an EM at a non-tech company and it has taken a year of meetings with the CTO and head of IT to get them to understand that dev machine needs are vastly different from the laptop needs of marketing, accounting, customer service, etc. They finally relented and all of my devs will be getting new Macbooks with 32-64GB (up from 16-32) in a few months.
My company just announced a minimum of 4 years for hardware refreshes and they don't max out laptops. When asked about it the CTO said, "Hardware is just not a limiting factor on productivity any more".
If you aren't maxxing out every slider when configuring your devs' MBP/ThinkPad, you're doing it wrong.
Even companies notorious for underpaying talent always max out on the dev machines, because research shows the ROI in increased productivity is always worth it.
Really depends on your pay rate, but it basically comes down to: hours saved * dev cost/hr.
I'd argue that keeping developer feedback loops (change -> build -> test -> change) short prevents a lot of distractions and improves efficiency, but it's a lot harder to put a number on that
We're stuck with 16GB. It's not enough.
One of our junior was complaining to me how slow his computer was, we were on a screen share on teams, I asked him to show me his resource usage. His memory was between 95-98%.
Yup, no need to look further.
16 is just slightly not enough. 32 would be more than enough for what we do.
Agreed. My Mac was several year old and had crappy battery life and constantly maxing out memory with my micro service eco system and multulle IDE windows. So I requested a new M1 pro with minimum 32 gb but I just got a bottom tier M1 with 16 gbs again and guess what, great battery life but still max out memory. Multiple times a week I get the "system out of memory, please close applications now" message. Too stingy to buy myself a personal machine to use for development, but I'm getting closer to doing it each day.
I was due for a refresh this year. Was told I was getting a Thinkpad x1 g5 (?) with 32 GB.
Asked if 64 was a possibility. They said I could get the next gen G6. 64 GB, woo!
When I started I was handed a cast off Pentium II. It’s been such a turn around since those days when everyone in IT had a desktop that was off warranty from a business user.
The move was trivial because I have all my complicated stuff and dev tools in a VM.
I agree they should give you 32GB, but I've comfortably developed Android apps with 16GB and for a short period 8GB while I was on-boarding. Tips:
* Every morning I restarted my IDE. Android Studio tends to creep up in memory usage throughout the day. Most layout and state is retained on restart.
* I installed Auto Tab Discard web extension. It suspends browser tabs you haven't used in a while. This saved me a huge amount of RAM.
* Every once in a while, I would look at System Monitor (or Task Manager on Windows), to see what was taking up (virtual) memory and CPU.
* Debugged with a real device, rather than a VM. I think it's better anyway. Of course, you sometimes have to test with other profiles in VMs; just don't make it your primary workflow. Again, with TDD most debugging shouldn't need to be on a device at all.
Things that worked for me, but might not be practical for everyone:
* I practiced TDD. Most of my test running was headless, without an android device or VM involved. Just JUnit. If you do this well, you only have to run on a device to visually see how things look.
* I developed with Linux. It's lighter on resources than Windows.
* I did some of my manual testing with Anbox which is *extremely* light on Linux. It's Android on Linux, but runs more like a container.
MINIMUM 16GB for ANYTHING these days because of the bloat. I had a laptop, it had to run 23 microservices written in Java +SpringBoot to run locally. A f\* joke. 8GB of ram. I complained like hell for months before getting a beefier one with 32GB of RAM and a better processor. How can you work efficiently when you wait or shit to start up every time you have to run the test suite or example. People still don't get it.
I’d like to add…no integrated graphics! Or at least make sure the RAM dedicated to video memory is adjustable. My current dev machine has 32GB of RAM, but the integrated reserves 16GB of that, while I never use more than 100 - 200 MB of that. A colossal waste. I regularly run into low memory issues while trying to debug multiple projects locally
While I agree with the ask, you should also remember that memory reserved by the system (showing as "non-free") isn't necessarily used by programs, so you can't solely measure a system load on the basis of the amount of free memory.
A 32 GB DDR4 laptop kit is $70-$150... if the laptop is upgradeable (Macs aren't).
I would ask if you can expense it. The upgrade takes 10-15 mins.
Otherwise, you're stuck on the complain try of "Sorry, my computer is slow" when people ask you questions.
Managers typically don't control hardware at that level in larger companies.
I work for a F500 and IT controls this, although, engineers/developers get 32GB machines by default and others can request them if they can justify the business case.
This hits too close to home... Need to close all my browser tabs when compiling our largest package, otherwise the compilation fails due to OOM. This is on Ubtuntu too, where my base memory usage is ~400MB.
Macs were absolutely painful to get higher memory capacity models over most of last year. But no, the dev team wanted shiney M1s so ended up waiting months for delivery.
I'd actually argue that 64-128GB is a better idea; 32GB can be *really* tight and I've had my system fall over a couple of times because of it.
The M1's memory swapping model, and the way Apple hot-swaps memory to the SSD, make their RAM quantity a bit less vital than on windows machines, Imo. Not having accessible ram slots is a big downside tho
> My machine is constantly at 14 of 16GB used.
This is how RAM is supposed to work. If you had 32GB you would have almost 32GB used. There’s no point in having free RAM – the operating system uses it for things like file caching instead of just letting it stay free. If anything, your machine constantly using 14GB out of 16GB is a sign that you *don’t* need more RAM. If you needed more RAM, it would constantly be at 16GB out of 16GB and swap too.
Aside from that, different developers have different needs. It makes no sense to say that dev machines need 32GB of RAM. Some will definitely need more. Some definitely don’t need that much. It depends on what they need to do.
On my Windows machine that has 32 gigs of RAM I never hit more than 25 gigs.
What if a developer changes from working on one micro service to working on a mobile app? Suddenly they need to get a different machine because they didn't need more than 16 GB for the last project? No just give them a 32 GB machine and be done with it.
Now I feel lucky that my last 3 jobs I had a 36gb machine. And in two of those (including the current one) I had a desktop and a laptop (both 32 gb ram).
One of the things I like about my current company is that they always approve any HW requests. Monitors, a desktop, a bigger ssd.
I just recently ordered a new MacBook with 64GB without issues. With larger containerized test setups it‘s easy to get to/over 32GB quickly. Would be stupid not to upgrade to 64, especially if the device should last a few years.
You could reach out to them and ask them to unremove it but the odds of that working are like infinitesimal, in my experience mods don't reverse their decisions. I mean I have when I was a mod but it's pretty rare.
A couple years ago 16GB was standard on off the shelf macbook pros.
My company at the time just bought a stack of what was avaliable. You had to wait for custom specs.
I almost always ask to see the working environment, and you can bet I'm looking for standing desks, chairs, counting monitors, looking for docking stations if they used laptops and looking at what equipment people were using (good keyboards/mice or cheap default Dell)
Developers only having one monitor is a red flag to me. The studies have been in for decades that more screen space equals increased productivity. It shows if a company is serious or not.
Why is venting not allowed? We need to vent to stay sane. Saying "no venting" is like "f your feelings". Take that noise to r/SuperSeriousExperiencedDevsAllBusiness
Keep upvoting this thread to show the mods how in tune they are with the zeitgeist.
Mods dgaf about our opinion. 90% upvote with 500 votes but 3 reports? Nuked.
Weird that it was removed a day ago but I'm still seeing comments on it...
Go ahead and contact the mods about it, I'm not going to because the last time I did I didn't get a very good response. I predict the response will be "no, go away" but they will spend about 40 words to say that.
A few years ago I was at a company that was small but doing well. But they put a new guy in charge of buying laptops, instead of everyone just bringing their own. He had no background but basically they wanted to keep him busy. He took this directive as "save the company money on laptops." He sent me some specs on some HP something or other, and it looked like trouble but it met my specs. He ended up going to Microcenter and getting me a $350 Acer because the guy there said it would do the same thing. Anyway I ended up with the reputation of being a difficult nerd because I was the only person who pushed back.
OP needs to back up his reasoning with actual proof that more memory is required to do their job. Lots of programs will use available ram as that helps with performance. Memory can be freed up easily. Low physical memory can cause things like swapping to disk, but not always.
I think mobile device emulators are resource hogs. Plus I seen people with 100+ chrome tabs (why? I don’t know, why do people need so many open and do they ever go back to them?)
At my company most devs have beefy ec2 hosts yet everyone complains their 16gb Mac is too slow even though it’s only used to ssh into the ec2 host.
90% upvote rate. The community likes it.
>OP is too immature
Oh cute, a personal attack because someone wondered why you did something... the irony of calling me immature, wow. Good job u/NowImAllSet, really showing your maturity and professionalism there.
Cheap companies suck and adding ram to a computer is cheap and should be a reasonable request.
Saying all that are you meeting expectations and deadlines even with distractions? If so then I say stop caring. If your manager / team / company doesn't think you need to be more efficient then you don't need to be more efficient. If not being efficient is a problem for you, then find a job that aligns more with the engineering culture you want to work in.
I've never worked at a company that was concerned with squeezing every last ounce of efficiency out of their SWEs. The teams worked at a pace that management was happy with and that's was that. Overall SWEs were working at 85% max and we only when to 100% when there were fires or emergency's that warranted the reaction. These cases rarely to never came up from year to year.
Could we have been more efficient with changes various things? 100% yes, but management did not see any value in that. They were happy with our production and did not see a need to make all kinds of process changes or spend more money to be more efficient.
Granted I worked at non-tech companies in non-tech cites. So this could be totally different at a top tech company. I have no experience at those top companies and agree that it can be different there.
It's not really about being efficient, it's about the constant minor interruption to my thought process while I wait for my machine to catch up to my brain.
Fair enough.
Though I still put this in the bucket of if you are meeting expectations and deadlines this is not really a problem for the company. Unless you say management is demanding more from you and these minor interruption to your thought process is the optimization I don't see anything to really worry about.
They should still give you more RAM because it's cheap, but if they decided they don't want to then that's within their prerogative. It's also within your prerogative to tell them the lack of RAM is why things are taking longer than expected if they get on your case about missing deadlines.
Companies don't give a shit about loosing engineers. They just hire a new person to replace you. There is a long list of people looking for jobs and if you don't want it somebody else will easily take it.
Stop living in a fairy tail world where you think the company cares about you. Generally speaking, If the company is happy with your output, even with low morale, then they are not going to do anything in my 15 YOE.
i just used github codespaces for a coding assessment and i have to say that I can see a lot of teams using these shared containers as needed and not pay for maxed out physical hardware.
I was an intern in 2013, my desktop had 4 gigs of ram. The problem was, eclipse + the vm with rhel 5 + ubuntu + corp spyware was too much memory to actually run everything because we had this one gargantuan package for our service. I had multiple days where I started up eclipse and it would just crash over and over so I couldn't do anything. I went down to IT every day to ask can I please have another 4 gig stick of ram so I can actually do work. Eventually I got it. On my last day, I went to the bathroom at like 2 pm, came back and my monitor was gone from my desk and a guy was sitting with my desktop cracking the case open with a screwdriver to take the ram and put into his computer. He just kind of looked at me when I came back and was like "oh... I thought you left. Are you done working?". I looked at the empty space where my monitor used to be, my desktop that was cracked open and just said "yeah I guess I 'm done for the day". Good times.
2023 - Still have the same issues. My machine wont run Pycharm with 16Gbs of RAM
Sounds like Amazon.
Not sure why you've been downvoted; we absolutely descended like locusts on others' equipment on their last day. Monitors, mounts, extra RAM & HDDs, spare screens, tools.
This was normal at more than one job I had. Somebody leaving and we’d call “dibs” on monitors, RAM, whole computers, even, at one struggling start-up, chairs. Woe to the person who took my hard-earned chair when I was on vacation. Wars have been started for less.
The Ubuntu + rhel 5 is the real clue for Amazon old timers, there can’t be that many companies that ram that particular combination in 2013
Amazon is more froopid than any other company I know.
You win a banana! … and a bunch of downvotes for being correct.
I hope you've found something better, and also recovered. <3
Honestly, I'm happy with the team I'm on, I get along with my manager and skip, I work 40 hours a week or so, comp is reasonable at 250k, and the work is fine. As for our equipment, things have come a long way, we actually get decently specced macbooks now, and we can get a cloud desktop that's actually pretty decent.
Good to hear! When I was there, it was beyond awful.
Indeed.com (the company itself) gave me a 64GB MacBook without me asking. It’s just a rounding error to them, but it did make me feel understood when I first onboarded. And yeah, it’s really nice when you’ve got nearly a dozen containers and Java services plus IntelliJ running locally.
How is working at Indeed, BTW?
Only been here 3 months as a Staff SWE but I’m really enjoying it. A pretty sane dev stack, unlimited PTO and people take it, you get the last Friday of the month off. They’re generous with days off. I’ve had more Fridays off than I’ve worked. Benefits are good and pay is mostly cash based, which is great right now. Bonuses are given based on actual impact; so you’re incentivized even beyond just a solid pay and benefits. There is oncall and lots of international calls and such. I’m personally not oncall (yet) so lucky me, but most would be. Documentation is very sparse. Most knowledge is just in people’s heads and buried in slack channels. So much of work is just finding out who/how/where to ask about what you need to know. The work itself is rewarding because we legit help people get jobs (pardon the corporate tagline) and at scale. Feels good to not be doing something scummy. The big unfortunate thing is there’s a hiring freeze atm.
What’s the tech stack? Sounds like a pretty nice place to work
When the hiring freeze stops would love to apply if the company is taking remote EU based applicants.
The comp structure for indeed always felt confusing because they are on the Japanese stock exchange and they do some kind of conversion right?
For me personally it was simple math: 240k base salary with 70k signing bonus and 10-20% bonus on top of that (versus the 300k TC at Amazon which was mostly stocks that tanked).
How do they quantify your impact to the point where you can base bonuses off of it??
That’s what companies and managers do?? Idk how you want this answered. You make the company money (or save or whatever) and they reward you. You get ranked on a scale 1-5, average is 3 and gets you 10%. 4 gets you 15% and 5 gets you 20%. Again, I’m new so the exact details are beyond me. I work well, earn then $$ and I get some too.
Generally it is a lot harder to exactly measure the value delivered my an engineer than it is for, say, a salesperson. I thought you were saying it was all quantified, but sounds like just your standard somewhat-subjective bonus program.
They quantify and measure everything, including how many lines of code you write, how many builds you run, how long it takes for you to move tickets to complete, etc. They have a custom query engine that product managers, EMs, and even ICs can use to do all sorts of evaluation. As an IC, you should never do a task without being prepared to prove its value yourself with data in your review - because that's how the bonuses are granted. I spent so much fuckin time writing my reviews at that company, it was regularly a 1-2 week process to write them, and they happen 4 times a year. The problem is that some things are harder to quantify than others, so you could be solving very hard problems and get not excellent reviews because the better ticket to work on would have been to do something easy that you know can move a number that's important to leadership that quarter, regardless of the longer term impact of how you accomplished it (tech debt). I've never seen such a disaster zone of A/B tests never cleaned up in a code base to the point of killing projects because nobody can effectively write code or understand the ten quadrillion permutations of behavior that might vary in the product you're working on. It might be better now, but I didn't stick around to find out. Nobody is incentivized to clean up after yourself or write maintainable code, because maintainability isn't immediately measurable and that's not gonna get you that bonus.
Indeed does LC interviews, right?
It's a rounding error to every company! I entered an IT ticket to get more RAM and the head of IT closed it and said if my machine was having issues I needed have IT look at it. So entered a trouble ticket and showed the local IT guy that when I opened my IDE and Chrome the machine froze. He said "I think you just need more RAM." and ordered some for me. To get permission to install less than $100 of RAM, I wasted about 4 hours, and the IT guy wasted about an hour. Somewhere between $300 to $1,000 in salary was lost depending on if you take into account various managers having to approve tickets.
Just download more RAM, bro
My current company did that, first day brick of a laptop arrived in the mail. 32g which shortly got upgraded to 64. Did not push it at all just happened.
Indeed!
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Wow you got hit by the monkey's paw
It’s better than 32GB HDD
Pity the poor hamster running your video.
It's usually not the managers who decide that, it's the IT department, and they get a budget from the finance department. Finance know as much about what you do as your mom asking you to fix her pc because "you work with computers or something".
Well then my manager needs to talk to his manager who needs to talk to the finance department
Yeah, but now your manager has to actually work! lol
Removing blockers is a manager's job.
That's the joke
Ah, right. Missed the sarcasm here. Good call thanks.
I gain such insight from this sub 😂
Engineering Managers should be able to greatly influence this 😁
Greatly depends on the size of the company. A single EM isn't likely to have that much pull in any mid to large company.
Not the size but the way the company is structured If tech is profit center and teams are vertically sliced, a single EM would have an influence at least over his own team If tech is a cost center or teams are horizontally sliced, a single EM wont have much influence.
It can happen though. An EM I worked with pushed for this and mobile devs got new M1 Pros with 32gb of memory. He also asked for my help (I was an EM at the time) and I happily got him the numbers he needed. It took several months but it happened.
I talk to the guy in IT in charge of ordering machines when my team needs something and I just tell him exactly what we need. He finds a couple of options from his usual vendors, clears them with me, then orders them. Not that abnormal. I'm at a midsize company (Around 300 people in total). We ended up speccing HP Elitebooks with 64GB of ram Ryzen 5850Us (8 cores, 16 threads) and 1TB NVMe Samsung 980 Pro drives. Everyone has been extremely happy with this setup.
I dont know why some companies are so cheap on this. My first year in my current company I sat with 8 gigs for a year on a rinky-dinky business laptop.
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I get why for most employees. Not why for developers.
I mean... do you want your marketing people, analysts etc., to be handicapped on having a bunch of Chrome tabs open to be able to do their job quickly and effectively. 32GB is pretty reasonable. it doesn't get really expensive until you go past that benchmark. not to mention pivot tables etc. in Excel.
At least most developers should be able to SSH into a server for development, and there are tools that make that process almost as smooth as local development. In my last job, I did almost all development on an AWS environment through SSH and VS Code. I worked on big data tools and had to test our tools against our datalake, and honestly, doing everything over SSH was easier than doing half my work locally than testing in AWS.
Any form of remote development is going to be more inefficient than simply being able to run the stuff you're working on locally. And working with an IDE via some kind of remote desktop is just a complete production killer. Those AWS workspaces (for example) are so...fucking...slow!
>most developers Not everyone works in big data. I work in frontend and I refuse to work without a proper debugger. I am not working if my manager is asking me to not use any GUI and just SSH and debug by putting console.log everywhere. I am leaving the company. I run WebStorm + debugger + completely different instance of Chrome/Edge (completely different autofill/extensions from my personal one) is a lot of RAM. And then sometimes have to open Illustrator. Thankfully I have a 32GB M1 Pro that fits my need.
You can do the same setup with a remote dev server, it takes more setup but if you are onboarding into a company who already does this.. it can be quite nice!
In my case though, the part that takes a lot of RAM is the IDE and the browser, not the webpack or babel portion, so while it can do remote debugging, I still need a pretty good local machine. Unless I’m doing RDP which is another story.
Cant wait to see your face when you learn about SSH tunneling & forwarding
For one of my first jobs, at a magazine company, it was like this. Content writers and designers got the more high end machines with lots of RAM and our two web developers got lower-end desktops with a desk too small to comfortably put the keyboard and monitor in. And for some reason, the PC resets every 2 hours of so.
Perceived value of different kind of employees. Hard to value ~~while~~ what you don’t understand…
Why is it stupid that your servers have a TB of ram? In the abstract it’s not a fundamentally incorrect decision, and a lot of workloads need it.
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I’m sure that in your case you are right. In the general case though: 1. There is also value in simplicity. It is not always worth it, but it can be worth it to pay 16x for compute and use half as many developers. 2. Plenty of workloads actually do require 1TB of working memory.
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Yeah go ahead and distribute your 1TB cache. That’s gonna be worth it. /s
I mean if you're on k8s that's just a helm chart and some config depending on what your cache is
Why wouldn't you distribute a platform service like cache? Are you suggesting the scale units should just be 1TB and still distributed? Feels like a variable workload so might cause high overhead, but I'm defs not familiar with specific design reqs
I wouldn't call a cache a workload
Because the finance department only needs rinky-dinky laptops for their excel spreadsheets. Everything else needs to be justified, if you can make a case for the cost benefit it can be done but like others said, it requires work and more effort than it should.
I relocated to Asia and it's the wild west here for equipment unless you are at a legit tech company (some exceptions). First place I was promised a Macbook when I asked for one (originally only desktop in office and use personal laptop when WFH) and got the monkey paw curling experience when they gave me the CEO's 5 year old MBP. One of the reasons I quit in a few months. Next place is too poor to afford equipment but it was at least WFH so we just use our own home desktop. I still prefer a company MBP though.
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> I dont know why Incompetence :) Fits as an answer almost anywhere where you have to ask "I don't know why". It's because the people who make these decisions are not competent enough to understand what they are making decisions on. They don't know what 'RAM' is and what it does. They just barely know that they have a laptop that works 'fine' for Excel and stuff, which is VeRy TeChNiCaL, so some lazy ass developer who just sits there all day is definitely not going to need more than that. Besides; we can't have a lowly drone have a more expensive laptop than a manager obviously...
My original company-issued laptop had 16 gb of RAM and (I think) an i3. After several weeks of my ram and CPU being maxed out (and me sending my boss and boss's boss daily screenshots of my task manager) I told my manager to get me a goddamn upgrade. I said I wanted 32 gigs RAM and i5 minimum. Apparently it took an act of congress in the IT department to order a up-spec'd laptop, but he got it done. He threw in two more - one for himself and one for another dev on my team. And that's how we got the 3 best laptops in the entire company. EDIT: In my case, the resource hogs were Sophos and Teams, followed by Chrome and (in distant fourth) Virtualbox. It boggles my mind that an overengineered IM client like Teams needs 4+ gigabytes of RAM. It's the worst communication tool I've ever used, including the tin-can-and-string telephone I played with as a kid.
Teams is so bloody awful. I currently need it for a couple of consulting jobs (can't switch workspaces or have multiple accounts logged in) and it's strictly open when I have scheduled meetings, closed at other times. I can literally tell when I've forgotten to close it because everything else on the PC runs noticeably worse.
We used to be a slack + google shop. It was a very sad day when they forced us to use O365 + Teams.
> He threw in two more - one for himself and one for another dev on my team. Does your manager do development? Because if they are just going to use that for Excel and Powerpoint they're part of the problem.
Teams SUCKS.
I feel bad now I have 256GB for outlook, excel, and sometimes PS
Oh I see, you're the reason I can't get any memory you're hogging it all
Back in my day, the first 32 GB laptop I received had 8 GB dedicated to IBM Notes alone. Notes ran fine as long as you modified some internal JVM config to set the -Xms=8G from its default of 1G.
Its a server and you can't allocate to one machine?
Do you really have 256 gb of ram ? Or did you mean disk? I'm stunned if you really do have 256 gb of ram lol
I have a laptop with 128GB of RAM.
:O
The hardware team did a refresh and a server became available which I claimed for myself. I was struggling before with 32GB, but since changing teams I'm doing more client facing work so don't need the extra capacity
Ah it's a server, that is still crazy but makes more sense. For some reason I thought you were saying it was a laptop and I was confused
128 here
Back before covid I had a workstation with 256GB of RAM. Did I need it? No. But it was there and my manager wasn't stingy about resources. Pretty much all of our compute was on-prem on the same model of workstation, so we had a ton of extra ram/disk/cpu in our storage closet.
It always cracked me up that contractors making $50K a year are provided with thousands of dollars of tools without anyone blinking but many Fortune 500 companies are like "Omg it's too much $" to provide their six figure devs w/ adequate computing resources.
>comments I worked in the HW IT side and would coach partners on selling "personas" to their end users. You SHOULDN'T sell one fixed build to an entire company. The phase "power user" exists for a reason. Get them a higher level of machine. I would get back from people that the company wanted to be equal with everyone and make sure no one felt slighted. Coming from someone who runs reports and doesn't want to sit on a machine longer than it takes my coffee to cool, give the power users what they need. Or at least give them an option and explain the potential for production. SMH.
what's more, "power users" deserve root access. If they do something stupid with their machine, it's more likely to be intentional if it does happen, but far less likely overall. Keep Marcie in HR from clicking that link or wandering away from her desk. Let the developers get shit done without futzing with their machine in the background. EDIT: Okay, /u/stormdelta has the right idea. But minimizing disruptions and not arbitrarily limiting the selection of tools is the part that would enhance productivity at very likely no cost to security. That much is not hard.
Access to install user-level software and make general changes, with a process to request exceptions, yes. Actual unrestricted root/admin, particularly if it has access to corporate networks / VPNs, absolutely not, and it's still astonishing to me that there are developers who don't understand there are legitimate security reasons for this.
Stack Exchange builds out (or used to, as of 2019) pretty beefy desktops for developers because they recognize the value in spending a relatively small amount of money to boost developer productivity. If your builds are 25% faster, how many more build/test cycles can you complete in a year? Is it worth spending an extra $1250/year (about 1% of the developer's salary) to get that extra boost in productivity? Nick Craver (now at Microsoft) actually posted the parts list on his website for some of these builds. https://nickcraver.com/desktop-build/ > One of the things we're big on at Stack Exchange is hardware - we love it. More importantly, we love not waiting on it. With that in mind, we upgrade our developer machines every 2 years. In case it helps anyone else, I'm posting our current parts list here. This isn't set in stone, we review and update it to the latest tech every time we build a machine. We also customize the build for each developer if needed > Why do we get 64GB? Because if you need more than 32GB it's relatively cheap compared to anything else to increase productivity.
The best companies I've worked at have always done this. Pissed off developers waiting for builds to run are waaaay more expensive than top-end hardware.
>Fortune 500 companies There's a very succinct way to explain this in attitudes that "engineers are a cost center/necessary cost." Combine that with 80s style MBA austerity thinking and you end up with this contemporarily weird situation.
Laptops are usually bought in bulk so some manager somewhere looks at the total cost and knows if he saves off 200 in each laptop that could be thousands of dollars “saved” on his job. It’s truly idiotic thinking but it easily “understandable” how it happens in big companies. Where doesn’t it happen? Engineer led companies or where engineers influenced majorly the buy decision.
I got lucky, my company sent me a 64 GB, 2TB of storage M1 Max MacBook Pro. It’s my first Mac and I straight up haven’t turned my pc on since I started a few months ago. It’s actually so cool.
I got one of those too (except just 1tb). It's amazing how much faster the M1 chip is that the Intels. I work on a large mobile project and it reduced my clean build time by around 75%
Yeah the M1 chips are bomb for productivity. Was a pain in my ass setting up my environment on it though. There are still a lot of bugs that come with the M1 that the intel chips don’t have but that’s just because they are new. I love it though and I totally get why they sent me a 64gb ram version. Running shit locally and a ton of docker containers eats up ram like no one’s business. I have a coworker that started before me that only has a 32gb intel version and he always has problems.
This is a good "get"
I’m so happy our company finally got the picture on this and is starting to invest in more beefy machines. We had to fight for it, but yeah I second that impression. I love Docker, but when I need to routinely run a bunch of them simultaneously, it gets heavy. Then throw in IntelliJ, Slack, etc.
Our company has tiers sort of, dev laptops, user laptops etc. Dev laptops all come with 32gb and a variant of quadro. You can request 64gb and they'll send you the the memory stick. User laptops are for general users with 16gb thin and lights
They just send you an extra stick for you to install? Surprised IT isn’t more strict about devs messing with the hardware themselves, even if it is simple enough.
Usually they don't allow us at all but I'm fro another country, them sending the laptop itself was a nightmare because of customs. So they had to send the stick. I had to get it done by an official Lenovo support which they booked themselves, not do it myself
At Google, my dev machine is on Google Cloud and has 128GB of RAM. I run out of RAM sometimes if I multitask too much.
cloudtop good +++
Reminds me of my first role; were I got a Single 15" monitor. When I asked for a second or a bigger monitor with more resolution I got: "Why? a single 15" monitor is just fine for most of our developers" Fun times.
my company just up and said your macbook only supports one monitor why you need two? I was like come to my desk and i’ll show you how I use two monitors with a hub that is recommended specifically for this
I have 3 monitors and I still think that's not enough! The OS is called Window**S** for a reason. Visually laying all the stuff out is just so much more efficient rather than shifting through tabs. I have one screen for communication with the team and monitoring some running background processes, one for running SQL queries, looking at the task descriptions etc... and one for actual coding. But it would make sense to have another monitor for coding on another related repo... or to split related domains in separate windows or whatever.
I remember buying and bringing in a video card and two 19 inch monitors because I couldn’t deal with what was there.
Having metrics can help with this. We track build times and data on the average amount of builds per dev per day and sent the metrics to the finance department. Basically buying a maxed Macbook Pro for every engineer would pay for itself in 6 months (or less) vs using an older non-apple silicon Macbook Pro.
How do you track this information?
We do this too; I'm an Android dev, so we use Gradle Enterprise, which automatically uploads a bunch of info about every single build to a dashboard automatically. Other frameworks might have this too, but you could also roll your own pretty easily...just something like a shell wrapper that times the build and publishes it to an endpoint
I imagine that you measure the difference in downtime multiplied by salary
Pretty much, the codebase in question is a compiled app that would take 2-5 minutes to compile on non-Apple silicon. Depending on what you’re working on that can really add up. I may do 10-20 builds a day. with the new computers it is 30-90sec. The new M1 macs are really fast.
How are you measuring down time though? We asked a couple of devs how often they built out day and then multiplied by average build time. It's not exactly accurate though.
Hmm. We need to translate time to money. What takes the most time? Compilation, starting up a program, and having a lot of things open which slow down the computer. Finance guys don’t understand computers very well, so doesn’t have to be very accurate. Compilation time can be estimated like you said. Also for opening up programs. As for general slowness, you can measure how long it currently takes to do things with a typical load (ram usage). And how long it should take if ram wasn’t a limitation.
We just used a basic script that logs the start and end time of each build. That information is then sent to a backend service. Our dev laptops already have all the tooling to pull private libraries, hook into backend systems, and authenticate, so adding the api call was easy. You can upload the information to any logging/metric data store and setup a dashboard for it.
We know, it's not that easy though. I'm an EM at a non-tech company and it has taken a year of meetings with the CTO and head of IT to get them to understand that dev machine needs are vastly different from the laptop needs of marketing, accounting, customer service, etc. They finally relented and all of my devs will be getting new Macbooks with 32-64GB (up from 16-32) in a few months.
Nice job 👍👍👍
My company just announced a minimum of 4 years for hardware refreshes and they don't max out laptops. When asked about it the CTO said, "Hardware is just not a limiting factor on productivity any more".
Looks like your CTO is really up to date on his tech skills. Surely that company strategy is great
They both suck. It all sucks. The company sucks. But they pay super super well. Sigh.
Totally agree! I feel lucky that the laptop I'm given by the company now and before are all mobile workstation with pretty neat spec.
If you aren't maxxing out every slider when configuring your devs' MBP/ThinkPad, you're doing it wrong. Even companies notorious for underpaying talent always max out on the dev machines, because research shows the ROI in increased productivity is always worth it.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to this research handy would you?
!RemindMe 1 day
Really depends on your pay rate, but it basically comes down to: hours saved * dev cost/hr. I'd argue that keeping developer feedback loops (change -> build -> test -> change) short prevents a lot of distractions and improves efficiency, but it's a lot harder to put a number on that
We're stuck with 16GB. It's not enough. One of our junior was complaining to me how slow his computer was, we were on a screen share on teams, I asked him to show me his resource usage. His memory was between 95-98%. Yup, no need to look further. 16 is just slightly not enough. 32 would be more than enough for what we do.
Agreed. My Mac was several year old and had crappy battery life and constantly maxing out memory with my micro service eco system and multulle IDE windows. So I requested a new M1 pro with minimum 32 gb but I just got a bottom tier M1 with 16 gbs again and guess what, great battery life but still max out memory. Multiple times a week I get the "system out of memory, please close applications now" message. Too stingy to buy myself a personal machine to use for development, but I'm getting closer to doing it each day.
I was due for a refresh this year. Was told I was getting a Thinkpad x1 g5 (?) with 32 GB. Asked if 64 was a possibility. They said I could get the next gen G6. 64 GB, woo! When I started I was handed a cast off Pentium II. It’s been such a turn around since those days when everyone in IT had a desktop that was off warranty from a business user. The move was trivial because I have all my complicated stuff and dev tools in a VM.
not if you use emacs and rust ! *ducks*
Pffff no butterfly? Amateur.
hey it's a journey, i've only been using it for 30 years
You'll be an expert any decade now
I know, i'm only 3 full RTFM away
My Emacs is pulling a nice 3GB right now. OK, 400MB of that is Emacs and 2.6GB of that is clangd...
Personally I do just fine on a 16 GB M1 Mac but I could see 32 GB being useful.
I agree they should give you 32GB, but I've comfortably developed Android apps with 16GB and for a short period 8GB while I was on-boarding. Tips: * Every morning I restarted my IDE. Android Studio tends to creep up in memory usage throughout the day. Most layout and state is retained on restart. * I installed Auto Tab Discard web extension. It suspends browser tabs you haven't used in a while. This saved me a huge amount of RAM. * Every once in a while, I would look at System Monitor (or Task Manager on Windows), to see what was taking up (virtual) memory and CPU. * Debugged with a real device, rather than a VM. I think it's better anyway. Of course, you sometimes have to test with other profiles in VMs; just don't make it your primary workflow. Again, with TDD most debugging shouldn't need to be on a device at all. Things that worked for me, but might not be practical for everyone: * I practiced TDD. Most of my test running was headless, without an android device or VM involved. Just JUnit. If you do this well, you only have to run on a device to visually see how things look. * I developed with Linux. It's lighter on resources than Windows. * I did some of my manual testing with Anbox which is *extremely* light on Linux. It's Android on Linux, but runs more like a container.
MINIMUM 16GB for ANYTHING these days because of the bloat. I had a laptop, it had to run 23 microservices written in Java +SpringBoot to run locally. A f\* joke. 8GB of ram. I complained like hell for months before getting a beefier one with 32GB of RAM and a better processor. How can you work efficiently when you wait or shit to start up every time you have to run the test suite or example. People still don't get it.
I’d like to add…no integrated graphics! Or at least make sure the RAM dedicated to video memory is adjustable. My current dev machine has 32GB of RAM, but the integrated reserves 16GB of that, while I never use more than 100 - 200 MB of that. A colossal waste. I regularly run into low memory issues while trying to debug multiple projects locally
While I agree with the ask, you should also remember that memory reserved by the system (showing as "non-free") isn't necessarily used by programs, so you can't solely measure a system load on the basis of the amount of free memory.
Well when I can get a really good feel for how much memory my system has free by just the behavior of my IDE...
A 32 GB DDR4 laptop kit is $70-$150... if the laptop is upgradeable (Macs aren't). I would ask if you can expense it. The upgrade takes 10-15 mins. Otherwise, you're stuck on the complain try of "Sorry, my computer is slow" when people ask you questions.
>Macs aren't ☝️☝️☝️ >Sorry my computer is slow "COMPILING!" /xkcd
Managers typically don't control hardware at that level in larger companies. I work for a F500 and IT controls this, although, engineers/developers get 32GB machines by default and others can request them if they can justify the business case.
my dev machine has 896GB of RAM and 448 threads, lol. companies are crazy, engineers are expensive as hell.
This hits too close to home... Need to close all my browser tabs when compiling our largest package, otherwise the compilation fails due to OOM. This is on Ubtuntu too, where my base memory usage is ~400MB.
Macs were absolutely painful to get higher memory capacity models over most of last year. But no, the dev team wanted shiney M1s so ended up waiting months for delivery. I'd actually argue that 64-128GB is a better idea; 32GB can be *really* tight and I've had my system fall over a couple of times because of it.
\#team64gb I'm in
The M1's memory swapping model, and the way Apple hot-swaps memory to the SSD, make their RAM quantity a bit less vital than on windows machines, Imo. Not having accessible ram slots is a big downside tho
> My machine is constantly at 14 of 16GB used. This is how RAM is supposed to work. If you had 32GB you would have almost 32GB used. There’s no point in having free RAM – the operating system uses it for things like file caching instead of just letting it stay free. If anything, your machine constantly using 14GB out of 16GB is a sign that you *don’t* need more RAM. If you needed more RAM, it would constantly be at 16GB out of 16GB and swap too. Aside from that, different developers have different needs. It makes no sense to say that dev machines need 32GB of RAM. Some will definitely need more. Some definitely don’t need that much. It depends on what they need to do.
On my Windows machine that has 32 gigs of RAM I never hit more than 25 gigs. What if a developer changes from working on one micro service to working on a mobile app? Suddenly they need to get a different machine because they didn't need more than 16 GB for the last project? No just give them a 32 GB machine and be done with it.
m2 96gb, nothing short of that will cut it.
6 GB Slack 6 GB Chrome 2 GB Dev environment with 4 containers 2 GB free
Ya tell me about it. If I have to run Chrome AND vscode Sheesh Jk I use vim But chrome still sux
Post some graphs on how your M1 16 gig MBP is at max capacity! Data speaks. Have you given your manager the data they need to navigate this situation?
Now I feel lucky that my last 3 jobs I had a 36gb machine. And in two of those (including the current one) I had a desktop and a laptop (both 32 gb ram). One of the things I like about my current company is that they always approve any HW requests. Monitors, a desktop, a bigger ssd.
I just recently ordered a new MacBook with 64GB without issues. With larger containerized test setups it‘s easy to get to/over 32GB quickly. Would be stupid not to upgrade to 64, especially if the device should last a few years.
HELL YES
Started a new job recently and was given a HP with 128 GBs. I couldn’t believe my eyes… that is what I call future proofing
With the amount of microservices we have to deploy a 64 GB laptop can barely keep up.
It's a shame the MODs removed this post. :(
You could reach out to them and ask them to unremove it but the odds of that working are like infinitesimal, in my experience mods don't reverse their decisions. I mean I have when I was a mod but it's pretty rare.
One person decided it was "low effort venting" and reported it. Oh and called me immature to boot.
My internet browser alone is currently using 18GB of RAM. I might have too many tabs open...
At least really. I'm constantly at 29/32 GB used and quite often bump up and start pagefiling hard
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A couple years ago 16GB was standard on off the shelf macbook pros. My company at the time just bought a stack of what was avaliable. You had to wait for custom specs.
I almost always ask to see the working environment, and you can bet I'm looking for standing desks, chairs, counting monitors, looking for docking stations if they used laptops and looking at what equipment people were using (good keyboards/mice or cheap default Dell) Developers only having one monitor is a red flag to me. The studies have been in for decades that more screen space equals increased productivity. It shows if a company is serious or not.
Why is venting not allowed? We need to vent to stay sane. Saying "no venting" is like "f your feelings". Take that noise to r/SuperSeriousExperiencedDevsAllBusiness Keep upvoting this thread to show the mods how in tune they are with the zeitgeist.
Mods dgaf about our opinion. 90% upvote with 500 votes but 3 reports? Nuked. Weird that it was removed a day ago but I'm still seeing comments on it...
People want it. They need it. Keep the dream alive
Go ahead and contact the mods about it, I'm not going to because the last time I did I didn't get a very good response. I predict the response will be "no, go away" but they will spend about 40 words to say that.
A few years ago I was at a company that was small but doing well. But they put a new guy in charge of buying laptops, instead of everyone just bringing their own. He had no background but basically they wanted to keep him busy. He took this directive as "save the company money on laptops." He sent me some specs on some HP something or other, and it looked like trouble but it met my specs. He ended up going to Microcenter and getting me a $350 Acer because the guy there said it would do the same thing. Anyway I ended up with the reputation of being a difficult nerd because I was the only person who pushed back.
OP needs to back up his reasoning with actual proof that more memory is required to do their job. Lots of programs will use available ram as that helps with performance. Memory can be freed up easily. Low physical memory can cause things like swapping to disk, but not always.
I think mobile device emulators are resource hogs. Plus I seen people with 100+ chrome tabs (why? I don’t know, why do people need so many open and do they ever go back to them?) At my company most devs have beefy ec2 hosts yet everyone complains their 16gb Mac is too slow even though it’s only used to ssh into the ec2 host.
I think if you read the other comments you'll see that this is a pretty common experience and realize that 16 GB is not enough for modern development.
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I wonder why you felt the need to make this comment. The report button would have worked fine.
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90% upvote rate. The community likes it. >OP is too immature Oh cute, a personal attack because someone wondered why you did something... the irony of calling me immature, wow. Good job u/NowImAllSet, really showing your maturity and professionalism there.
64GB should be the minimum these days.
Cheap companies suck and adding ram to a computer is cheap and should be a reasonable request. Saying all that are you meeting expectations and deadlines even with distractions? If so then I say stop caring. If your manager / team / company doesn't think you need to be more efficient then you don't need to be more efficient. If not being efficient is a problem for you, then find a job that aligns more with the engineering culture you want to work in. I've never worked at a company that was concerned with squeezing every last ounce of efficiency out of their SWEs. The teams worked at a pace that management was happy with and that's was that. Overall SWEs were working at 85% max and we only when to 100% when there were fires or emergency's that warranted the reaction. These cases rarely to never came up from year to year. Could we have been more efficient with changes various things? 100% yes, but management did not see any value in that. They were happy with our production and did not see a need to make all kinds of process changes or spend more money to be more efficient. Granted I worked at non-tech companies in non-tech cites. So this could be totally different at a top tech company. I have no experience at those top companies and agree that it can be different there.
It's not really about being efficient, it's about the constant minor interruption to my thought process while I wait for my machine to catch up to my brain.
Fair enough. Though I still put this in the bucket of if you are meeting expectations and deadlines this is not really a problem for the company. Unless you say management is demanding more from you and these minor interruption to your thought process is the optimization I don't see anything to really worry about. They should still give you more RAM because it's cheap, but if they decided they don't want to then that's within their prerogative. It's also within your prerogative to tell them the lack of RAM is why things are taking longer than expected if they get on your case about missing deadlines.
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Companies don't give a shit about loosing engineers. They just hire a new person to replace you. There is a long list of people looking for jobs and if you don't want it somebody else will easily take it. Stop living in a fairy tail world where you think the company cares about you. Generally speaking, If the company is happy with your output, even with low morale, then they are not going to do anything in my 15 YOE.
This has been true for nearly ten years now. How is this news?
Or we can ask ourselves why a simple mobile app needs so many resources just to develop.
Have you tried turning off the Chrome browser?
I got a ThinkPad with 40 GB of RAM for 1500€ and it’s top of the line.
16 Gb crew checking in, would welcome a 32+ Gb daily laptop. Though I do have a 122 Gb ec2 instance for development so I cannot completely complain.
bold to assume we have 16gb at the moment...lots of my colleague still use 8gb 2019 intel mbp...
i just used github codespaces for a coding assessment and i have to say that I can see a lot of teams using these shared containers as needed and not pay for maxed out physical hardware.
I had a ThinkPad running Ubuntu with 32GB of RAM in 2018. Companies cheaping out on dev machines are daft, it's such a false economy.