Employers, even the rich FANG types, are quite penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developer hardware.
Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation.
To be fair, I know plenty of people that would order the highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs, which is just a small fraction of one year's salary for a developer.
Every well funded startup I’ve worked for went through a period where employees could get nearly anything they asked for: New computers, more monitors, special chairs, standing desks, SaaS software, DoorDash when working late. If engineers said they needed it, they got it.
Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.
> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,
You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.
Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
"$1,000 chairs"
Not an expert here, but from what I heard, that would be a bargain for a good office chair. And having a good chair or not - you literally feel the difference.
I've been using the same $25 chair I bought 45 years ago. I've always thought the "ergonomic chair" was a scam.
I think ergonomic chairs are good for people who have poor posture. If you have a strong core and sit up straight all the time, you can probably sit on just about anything and be fine.
(I'm not saying you're wrong. I think the real solution is that people should take better care of their physical selves. Certainly there are also people with particular conditions and do need the more ergonomic setup, but I expect that's a small percentage of the total.)
Well, I do lot's of sport and can sit comfortable on hard ground meditating for quite some time. I still enjoy a good chair way more than something "normal" for any longer computer sessions.
If a chair is too comfortable, I just fall asleep in it. It doesn't make me work better.
A chair isn't any answer to poor posture. The answer is exercising your core muscles, being aware of your posture, and constantly correcting it.
Well, I found a good chair helps me, with keeping a good posture. Otherwise good advise.
For sure. $1000 Herman Miller Aeron has been worth every penny considering the time spent sat on it.
I've been on those fancy chairs when I worked at a faang.
Honestly, they aren't any better than my ikea office chair I stole from my first house when I was a student (and that's been with me for the last 15 years). It has probably costed less than 100 €/$.
Ikea stuff is really underrated in this sense.
Ergonomics is definitely something to skimp on!
If $20k is misspent by 1 in 100 employees, that's still $200 per employee per year: peanuts, really.
Just like with "policing", I'd only focus on uncovering and dealing with abusers after the fact, not on everyone — giving most people "benefits" that instead makes them feel valued.
The effect on morale shouldn't be ignored tho either
So then just set a limit of $200 per head instead of allowing a few bad apples to spend $20k all on themselves.
This was extra on top of whatever the average cost really is for employees who are not abusing the system.
So, if other engineers get their equipment for $6k (beefed-up laptop, 32" or 30" 5k widescreen screen, ergonomic chair, standing desk — in theory amortized over 3-10 years, but really, on the retention period which is usually <3 years in software), we are talking about an increase of $200 on that.
Maybe not peanuts, but the cost of administration to oversee spending and the cost to employees to provide proof and follow due process (in their hourly rate for time used) will quickly add up and usually negate any "savings" from stopping abuse altogether — since now everybody needs to shoulder the cost.
Any type of cap based on average means that those who needed something more special-cased (more powerful machine, more RAM vs CPU/storage, more expensive ergonomic setup due to their anatomy [eg. significantly taller than average]...) can't really get it anymore.
Obviously, having no cap and requiring manager approval is usually enough to get rid of almost all abuse, though it is sometimes important to be able to predict expenses throughout the year.
You could just have an average cap and require manager approval above that.
Don’t you think the problem there is that you hired the wrong people?
Was trying to remember a counter example on good hires and wasted money.
Alex St. John Microsoft Windows 95 era, created directX annnnd also built an alien spaceship.
I dimly recalled it as a friend in the games division telling me about some someone getting 5 and a 1 review scores in close succession.
Facts i could find (yes i asked an llm)
5.0 review: Moderately supported. St. John himself hosted a copy of his Jan 10, 1996 Microsoft performance review on his blog (the file listing still exists in archives). It reportedly shows a 5.0 rating, which in that era was the rare top-box mark. Fired a year later: Factual. In an open letter (published via GameSpot) he states he was escorted out of Microsoft on June 24, 1997, about 18 months after the 5.0 review. Judgment Day II alien spaceship party: Well documented as a plan. St. John’s own account (quoted in Neowin, Gizmodo, and others) describes an H.R. Giger–designed alien-ship interior in an Alameda air hangar, complete with X-Files cast involvement and a Gates “head reveal” gag. Sunk cost before cancellation: Supported. St. John says the shutdown came “a couple of weeks” before the 1996 event date, after ~$4.3M had already been spent/committed (≈$1.2M MS budget + ≈$1.1M sponsors + additional sunk costs). Independent summaries repeat this figure (“in excess of $4 million”).
So: 5.0 review — moderate evidence Fired 1997 — factual Alien spaceship build planned — factual ≈$4M sunk costs — supported by St. John’s own retrospective and secondary reporting
I’m not quite sure I see how building directx and building an alien spaceship are incompatible.
Nor how either translates to being a bad hire.
Well partly, yes.
But also, when I tell one of my reports to spec and order himself a PC, there should be several controls in place.
Firstly, I should give clear enough instructions that they know whether they should be spending around $600, $1500, or $6000.
Second, although my reports can freely spend ~$100 no questions asked, expenses in the $1000+ region should require my approval.
Thirdly, there is monitoring of where money is going; spending where the paperwork isn't in order gets flagged and checked. If someone with access to the company amazon account gets an above-ground pool shipped to their home, you can bet there will be questions to be answered.
Basic statistics. You can find 10 people that will probably not abuse the system but definitely not 100.
It’s like your friend group and time choosing a place to eat. It’s not your friends, it’s the law of averages.
Maybe so but it's not like that's something you can really control. You can control the policy so that is what's done.
As a company grows, it will undoubtedly hire some "wrong people" along the way.
Absolutely, but then you fire them again. Saves both salaries and expenses.
Which is a process that takes time.
> It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.
Yeah, it's hard to convey to people who've never been responsible for setting (or proposing) policy that it's not a game of optimizing the average result, but of minimizing the worst-case result.
You and I and most people are not out to arbitrage the company's resources but you and I and most people are also not the reason policy exists.
It was depressing to run into that reality myself as policy controls really do interfere sometimes in allowing people to access benefits the organization wants them to have, but the alternative is that the entire budget for perks ends up in the hands of a very few people until the benefit goes away completely.
Is it “soft fraud” when a manager at an investment bank regularly demands unreasonable productivity from their junior analysts, causing them to work late and effectively reduce their compensation rate? Only if the word “abuse” isn’t ambiguous and loaded enough for you!
Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.
I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?
> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.
I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.
I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.
Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.
Nah the laptop and the dinner are exactly the same, they only differ in timing.
You can steal $2000 by lying about a stolen laptop or lying about working late. The latter method just takes a few months.
We're not discussing lying about working late, we're discussing actually working late.
The person way upthread said:
> people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
That doesn't sound like actually working late?
(I still agree with you, though, that this isn't the equivalent of stealing a laptop, even if you do it enough to take home $2,000 worth of dinner.)
That's true, but the point I made to that was more along the lines of "physically being present in the office, it's likely an employee will still provide enough benefit to make the money worth it". They don't have to be coding. Chatting with a coworker about something non-work-related can be enough of a bonding experience for that to.be worth the company the dinner money in intangible productivity benefits down the line.
> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white.
Well, it was stolen. The only lie is by whom.
Your employer being unreasonable is not an excuse to defraud him in return.
Negotiate for better conditions. If agreement cannot be reached, find another job.
The pay and working hours are extremely well known to incoming jr investment bankers
Working late is official company policy in investment banking.
Is this meant to be a gotcha question? Yes, unpaid overtime is fraud, and employers commit that kind of fraud probably just as regularly as employees doing the things up thread.
none of it is good lol
>, unpaid overtime is fraud,
gp was talking about salaried employees which is legally exempt from overtime pay. There is no rigid 40-hour ceiling for salary pay.
Salary compensation is typical for white-collar employees such as analysts in investment banking and private equity, associates at law firms, developers at tech startups, etc.
The overtime is assumed and included in their 6-figure salaries.
Overtime can't be assumed by definition. If it's an expectation, it should be written into the contracted working hours, and then it's not overtime. (Or if there are no contracted working hours, then overtime could only be defined in relation to legally required maximum working hours, in which case it can't be an expectation for employees to exceed these without appropriate compensation.)
> contracted working hours,
> legally required maximum working hours
Neither of these apply in the context of full-time salaried US investment banking jobs that the parent comment is referring to.
People work these jobs and hours because the compensation and career advancement can be extremely lucrative.
People who worry about things like limiting their work hours do not take these jobs.
Sure, but in that case they are not working 'overtime', they are just working in the absence of any effective regulations governing reasonable working hours.
2 things:
1. My brothers (I have a number of them) mostly work in construction somehow. It feels most of them drive a VW Transporter, a large pickup or something, each carrying at least $30 000 in equipment.
Seeing people I work with get laptops that use multiple minutes to connect to a postgres database that I connect to in seconds feels really stupid. (I'm old enough that I get what I need, they usually rather pay for a decent laptop rather than start a hiring process.)
2. My previous employer did something really smart:
They used to have a policy that you got a basic laptop and an inexpensive phone, but you could ask for more if you needed. Which of course meant some people got nothing and some people got custom keyboards and what not.
That was replaced with a $1000 budget on your first day an $800 every year that was meant to cover phones and everything you needed. You could alsp borrow from next year. So if someone felt they needed the newest iPhone or Samsung? Fine, save up one year(or borrow from next year) and you have it.
Others like me who don't care that much about phones could get a reasonably priced one + a gpod monitor for my upstairs office at home + some more gear.
And now the rules are the same for everyone so even I get (I feel I'm hopeless when it comes to arguing my case with IT, but now it was a simple: do you have money for it? yes/no)
$3,000 standing desks?? It's some wood, metal and motors. I got one from IKEA in about 2018 for 500 gbp and it's still my desk today. You can get Chinese ones now for about 150 gbp.
The people demanding new top spec MacBook Pros every year aren’t the same people requesting the cheapest Chinese standing desk they can find.
I can understand paying more for fast processors and so on but a standing desk just goes up and down. What features do the high end desks have that I am missing out on?
I went with Uplift desks which are not $150 but certainly sub $1000. I think what I was paying for was the stability/solidity of the desk, the electronics and memory and stuff is probably commodified.
$300 electronic leg kit from Amazon + Ikea top is pretty solid and has memory etc
Furniture for managed office space has different requirements.
If someone's unstable motorized desk tips over and injures someone at the office, it's a big problem for the company.
A cheap desk might have more electrical problems. Potential fire risk.
Facilities has to manage furniture. If furniture is a random collection of different cheap desks people bought over the years they can't plan space without measuring them all. If something breaks they have to learn how to repair each unique desk.
Buying the cheapest motorized desk risks more time lost to fixing or replacing it. Saving a couple hundred dollars but then having the engineer lose part of a day to moving to a new desk and running new cables every 6 months while having facilities deal with disposal and installation of a new desk is not a good trade.
Doesnt matter, some people just want whatever the company will spring for them.
Stability and reliability.
Stability is a big one, but the feel of the desk itself is also a price point. You're gonna be paying a lot depending on the type of tabletop you get. ($100-1k+ just for the top)
Mine is very stable. Top is just some kind of board. It took a bit of damage from my cat's claws but that's not a risk most corporate offices have.
What price point did you buy at?
I paid a premium for my home height-adjustable desk because the frame and top are made in America, the veneer is much thicker than competitors, the motors and worm gears are reliable, and the same company makes coordinating office furniture.
The same company sells cheap imported desks too. Since my work area is next to the dining table in my open-plan apartment, I considered the better looks worth the extra money.
500 GBP in 2018. It looks functional but not stylish, which is all I needed. You make a good point about appearance: companies that want to create a certain impression for visitors are going to spring for better looking furniture.
If you buy from a dealer/manufacturer they come and set up the desk for you. You can also get stuff like really good sound absorbing panels and better integrated electricity and other stuff like that. If you buy system furniture like connected desks and cubibles it is probably the way to go.
Breaking news: "Trump tariffs live updates: Trump says US to tariff furniture imports following investigation"<https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live/trump-tariffs-live-updat...>
> individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range
peanuts compared to their 500k TC
Very few companies pay $500K. Even at FAANG a lot of people are compensated less than that.
I do think a lot of this comment section is assuming $500K TC employees at employers with infinite cash to spend, though.
But at the FAANGy companies I’ve worked at this issue persists. Mobile engineers working on 3yo computers and seeing new hires compile 2x (or more) faster with their newer machines.
If they care that much about compile time, they would work on a desktop instead of a laptop.
Then the company would issue a desktop and a laptop, since they want engineers to be able to use computers in places other than their desk.
Yep, but then the laptop just becomes a screen and keyboard and can be the cheapest on the market. Remoting into your desktop to code is much more efficient than actually coding on a laptop, especially if you care about compile time. Then you can even set something compiling, shut your laptop and jump on your bike home, and have it done by the time you get there!
...and we're back to trying to convince a penny-wise pound-foolish company to buy twice the computing hardware for every developer.
Or just buy everyone desktops. Honestly I think laptops are completely superfluous for every business I've ever worked at. Nobody is truly getting value out of bringing a laptop to meetings, they just like them.
I think whatever companies you were at just didn't have very effective meetings. There's a time for "laptops down" and there's a time for laptops. If we can't prototype, brainstorm, outline ideas... why even have meetings in the first place?
> why even have meetings in the first place
Exactly. I personally have never been in a meeting which I thought was absolutely necessary. Except maybe new fire regs.
Nope, laptops are just very cheap thin clients to remote onto the desktops with much higher power. This gives the advantage of being able to leave things compiling whilst you shut your laptop at the end of the day.
500k is not the average, and anyone at that level+ can get fancy hardware if they want it.
One, not everybody gets 500K TC.
Two, several tens of thousands are in the 5%-10% range. Hardly "peanuts". But I suppose you'll be happy to hear "no raise for you, that's just peanuts compared to your TC", right?
Not only are most developers (let alone other employees) making nowhere near that, why should spending $500k mean you waste $10k? Even saving small amounts matters when you add it up.
Why waste? If you get more than 2% value increase out of your 10k it’s a net gain.
Netflix, at least the Open Connect org, was still open ended adjacent to whatever NTech provided (your issued laptop and remote working stuff). It was very easy to get "exotic" hardware. I really don't think anyone abused it. This is an existence proof to the comment parents, it's neither a startup and I don't see engineers screwing the wheels off the bus anywhere I've ever worked.
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
> the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies.
It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work.
Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.
Good grief, no. They got an extra hour of productive (or semi-productive time; after 8 hours most people are, unsurprisingly, kind of worn down) out of us while waiting for dinner to arrive and a bit of team-building as we commiserate over whatever we're working on causing us to stay late over a meal. That more than offsets the cost of the food.
If an employee or team is not putting in the effort desired, that's a separate issue and there are other administrative processes for dealing with that.
Are you saying the mentality is offensive? Or is there a business justification I am missing?
Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees without paying for it.
It’s basic expense fraud.
If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone.
Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their meals, that’s expense fraud.
These things are really not gray area. It seems more obvious when we talk about sales people abusing budgets, but there’s a blind spot when we start talking about engineers doing it.
Frankly this sort of thing should be ignored, if not explicitly encouraged, by the company.
Engineers are very highly paid. Many are paid more than $100/hr if you break it down. If a salaried engineer paid the equivalent of $100/hr stays late doing anything, expenses a $25 meal, and during the time they stay late you get the equivalent of 20 minutes of work out of them- including in intangibles like team bonding via just chatting with coworkers or chatting about some bug- then the company comes out ahead.
That you present the above as considered "expense fraud" is fundamentally a penny-wise, pound-foolish way to look at running a company. Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.
> Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.
Luckily that comes down to the policy of the individual company and is not enforced by law. I am personally happy to pay engineers more so they can buy this sort of thing themselves and we dont open the company to this sort of abuse. Then its a known cost and the engineers can decide from themselves if they want to spend that $30 on a meal or something else.
To give them enough money to buy that $30 meal as a personal expense, you need to pay them around $50 in marginal comp expenses.
It can be a win for both sides for the employees to work an extra 30-90 minutes and have some team bonding and to feel like they’re getting a good deal. (Source: I did this for years at a place that comp’d dinner if you worked more than 8 hours AND past 6 PM; we’d usually get more than half the team staying for the “free” food.)
I have found that the success of things like this depend greatly on so many factors such as office type, location, team moral, management style, individual personalities, even mean age etc.
I have worked in places where the exact opposite of what you describe happens. As OP says, people just stop working at 6 and just start reading reddit or scrolling their phones. No team bonding and chat because everyone is wiped out from a hard day. Just people hanging around, grabbing their food when it arrives, and leaving.
We too had more than half the team staying for the “free” food, but they definitely didnt do much work whilst they were there.
> It’s basic expense fraud.
I'm making the case that mandatory unpaid overtime is effectively wage theft. It is legal in the US because half of jobs there are "exempt" from the usual overtime protections. There's no ethical reason for that, just political ones.
At any rate, I think people who want to crack down on meal expenses out of a sense of justice should get at least as annoyed by employers taking advantage of their employees in technically allowed ways.
Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing. The goto solution that most companies use is to remove all privileges for everyone. But really, this is a cultural issue. This is how company culture is lost when a company gets larger.
A better option is for leadership to enforce culture by reinforcing expectations and removing offending employees if need be to make sure that the culture remains intact. This is a time sync, without a doubt. For leadership to take this on it has to believe that the unmeasurable benefit of a good company culture outweighs the drag on leadership's efficiency.
Company culture is will always be actively eroded in any company and part of the job of leadership is to enforce culture so that it can be a defining factor in the company's success for as long as possible.
soft fraud mentality
This isn’t about fraud anymore. It’s about how suspiciously managers want to view their employees. That’s a separate issue (but not one directed at employees).
If a company says you have permission to spend money on something for a purpose, but employees are abusing that to spend money on something that clearly violates that stated purpose, that’s into fraud territory.
This is why I call it the soft fraud mentality: When people see some fraudulent spending and decide that it’s fine because they don’t think the policy is important.
Managers didn’t care. It didn’t come out of their budget.
It was the executives who couldn’t ignore all of the people hanging out in the common areas waiting for food to show up and then leaving with it all together, all at once. Then nothing changed after the emails reminding them of the purpose of the policy.
When you look at the large line item cost of daily food delivery and then notice it’s not being used as intended, it gets cut.
This might come as a bit of a surprise to you, but most (really all) employees are in it for money. So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning. That’s why you implement rules.
If you start trying to tease apart the motivations people have even if they are following those rules, you are going to end up more paranoid than Stalin.
> This might come as a bit of a surprise to you
> So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning.
I’m not “surprised” nor “astonished” nor do you need to be “concerned” for me. That’s unnecessarily condescending.
I’m simply explaining how these generous policies come to and end through abuse.
You are making a point in favor of these policies: Many will see an opportunity for abuse and take it, so employers become more strict.
I find your tone commendable, and I hope I can extend you the same courtesy of being respectful while disagreeing.
The idea that a company offering food in some capacity can be seen as generous is, at best, confusing and possibly naïve. A company does this because it expects such a policy will extract more work for less pay. There is no benevolence in the relationship between a company and an individual — only pure, raw self-interest.
In my opinion, the best solution is not to offer benefits at all, but simply to overpay everyone. That’s far more effective, since individuals then spend their own money as they choose, and thus take appropriate care of it.
> but most (really all) employees are in it for money
Yes, but some also have a moral conscience and were brought up to not take more than they need.
If you are not one of these types of people, then not taking complete over advantage of an offer like free meals probably seems like an alien concept.
I try to hire more people like this, it makes for a much stronger workforce when people are not all out to get whatever they can for themselves and look out for each others interests more.
This is disingenuous but soft-fraud is not a term I’d use for it. Fraud is a legal term. You either commit fraud or you do not. There is no “maybe” fraud—you comply with a policy or law or you don’t.
As you mentioned, setting policy that isn’t abused is hard. But abuse isn’t fraud—it’s abuse—and abuse is its own rabbit hole that covers a lot of these maladaptive behaviors you are describing.
It’s called expense fraud.
I call the meal expense abuse “soft fraud” because people kind of know it’s fraud, but they think it’s small enough that it shouldn’t matter. Like the “eh that’s fine” commenter above: They acknowledged that it’s fraud, but also believe it’s fine because it’s not a major fraud.
If someone spends their employer’s money for personal benefit in a way that is not consistent with the policies, that is legally considered expense fraud.
There was a case local to me where someone had a company credit card and was authorized to use it for filling up the gas tank of the company vehicle. They started getting in the habit of filling up their personal vehicle’s gas tank with the card, believing that it wasn’t a big deal. Over the years their expenses weren’t matching the miles on the company vehicle and someone caught on. It went to court and the person was liable for fraud, even though the total dollar amount was low five figures IIRC. The employee tried to argue that they used the personal vehicle for work occasionally too, but personal mileage was expensed separately so using the card to fill up the whole tank was not consistent with policy.
I think people get in trouble when they start bending the rules of the expense policy thinking it’s no big deal. The late night meal policy confounds a lot of people because they project their own thoughts about what they think the policy should be, not what the policy actually is.
Fraud is also used colloquially and it doesn't seem we're in a court of justice rn.
Where do you even get the $3,000 standing desk? I am don't even compare prices and I got mine from Amazon for $200-$300. Sure the quality might not be the best but I just can't see there are people buying $3000 standing desks.
This desk (used to?) fit the budget, for example: https://www.architonic.com/en/p/holmris-b8-milk-classic-1070...
Essentially, you pay a lot for fancy design.
Early in the pandemic I bought a decent motorized standing desk for $520. It's nice, but I could very easily imagine a desk that costs 6x that. I would never buy that desk, but some people go for that sort of thing.
Seriously? You can't budget an extra 10-20k for hardware upgrades for the Software Engineer that you are paying 300k a year for ?
Plus, not to mention the return on investment you get from retaining the talent and the value they add to your product and organization.
If you walk into a mechanic shop, just the Snap On primary tool kit is like 50k.
It always amazes me that companies go cheap on basic tools for their employees, yet waste millions in pointless endeavors.
I know a FAANG company whose IT department, for the last few years, has been "out of stock" for SSD drives over 250GB . They claim its a global market issue (it's not). There's constant complaining in the chats for folks who compile locally. The engineers make $300k+ so they just buy a second SSD from Amazon on their credit cards and self-install them without mentioning it to the IT dept. I've never heard a rational explanation for the "shortage" other than chronic incompetence from the team supplying engineers with laptops/desktops. Meanwhile, spinning up a 100TB cloud VM has no friction whatsoever there. It's a cushy place to work tho, so folks just accept the comically dumb aspects everyone knows about.
I've wondered if that's to make dealing with full disk backup/forensic collections/retention legal hold/etc easier: keep the official amount of end-user device storage to a minimum. And/or it forces the endpoint to depend on network/cloud storage, giving better business intelligence on what data is "hot".
Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do other than fuss at some random director or feedback form. Or quit, I guess. But that seems a little extreme.
Anyway, your choices of what to do about idiocy like this are pretty limited.
I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.
It's the opposite.
You're underestimating the scope of time lost by losing a few percent in productivity per employee across hundreds of thousands of employees.
You want speed limits not speed bumps. And they should be pretty high limits...
I don't believe anyone is losing >1% productivity from these measures (at FANG employers).
When Apple switched to their own silicon, I was maintaining the build systems at a scaleup.
After I saw the announcement, I immediately knew I needed to try out our workflows on the new architecture. There was just no way that we wouldn't have x86_64 as an implicit dependency all throughout our stack. I raised the issue with my manager and the corporate IT team. They acknowledged the concern but claimed they had enough of a stockpile of new Intel machines that there was no urgency and engineers wouldn't start to see the Apple Silicon machines for at least another 6-12 months.
Eventually I do get allocated a machine for testing. I start working through all the breakages but there's a lot going on at the time and it's not my biggest priority. After all, corporate IT said these wouldn't be allocated to engineers for several more months, right? Less than a week later, my team gets a ticket from a new-starter who has just joined and was allocated an M1 and of course nothing works. Turns out we grew a bit faster than anticipated and that stockpile didn't last as long as planned.
It took a few months before we were able to fix most of the issues. In that time we ended up having to scavenge under-specced machines form people in non-technical roles. The amount of completely avoidable productivity wasted from people swapping machines would have easily reached into the person-years. And of course myself and my team took the blame for not preparing ahead of time.
Budgets and expenditure are visible and easy to measure. Productivity losses due to poor budgetry decisions, however, are invisible and extremely difficult to measure.
> I raised the issue with my manager and the corporate IT team.
> And of course myself and my team took the blame for not preparing ahead of time.
If your initial request was not logged and then able to be retrieved by yourself in defence, then I would say something is very wrong at your company.
> able to be retrieved by yourself in defence
You are suggesting a level of due process that is wildly optimistic for most companies. If you are an IC, such blame games are entirely resolved behind closed doors by various managers and maybe PMs. Your manager may or may not ask you for supporting documentation, and may or may not be able to present it before the "retrospective" is concluded.
I could perhaps have been clearer with that point - this was more about public perception. People have a tendency to jump to conclusions - build system is not working, must be the build system team's fault.
But regardless, I already left there a few years back.
Actually, just time spent compiling, or waiting for other builds to finish makes investing in the top level macbook pro worth it every 3 years. I think the calculation assumed something like 1-2% of my time was spent compiling, and I cost like $100k per year.
Who is still doing builds on developer laptops instead of a remote build farm? You can have so much more compute available when it doesn't need to be laptop form factor.
The cost of a good office chair is comparable to a top tier gaming pc, if not higher.
Not for an enterprise buying (or renting) furniture in bulk it isn’t. The chair will also easily last a decade and be turned over to the next employee if this one leaves… unlike computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months even if your dev sticks around anyway.
> computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months
That seems unreasonably short. My work computer is 10 years old (which is admittedly the other extreme, and far past the lifecycle policy, but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it).
> My work computer is 10 years old... but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it
It depends what you're working on. My work laptop is 5 years old, and it takes ~4 minutes to do a clean compile of a codebase I work on regularly. The laptop I had before that (which would now be around 10 years old) would take ~40 minutes to compile to the same codebase. It would be completely untenable for me to do the job I do with that laptop (and indeed I only started working in the area I do once I got this one).
Right, the employee with unlimited spend would want to sit in a used chair.
That’s more or less my point from a different angle: unlimited spend isn’t reasonable and the justification “but $other_thing is way more expensive!” Is often incorrect.
An Aeron chair that's not been whacked with baseball bats looks pretty much the same after many, many years.
Are there any FANG employers unwilling to provide good office chairs? I think even cheap employers offer these.
I think my employer hed a contest to see which of 4 office chairs people liked the most, then they bought the one that everyone hated. I’m not quite sure anymore what kind of reason was given.
There are many that won’t even assign desks, much less provide decent chairs. Amazon and LinkedIn are two examples I know from personal experience.
Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.
For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.
XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/
The breakeven rate on developer hardware is based on the value a company extracts not their salary. Someone making X$/year directly has a great deal of overhead in terms of office space and managers etc, and above that the company only employees them because the company gains even more value.
Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.
Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.
It's not abuse to open 500 Chrome tabs if they're work-related and increase my productivity.
I am 100x more expensive than the laptop. Anything the laptop can do instead of me is something the laptop should be doing instead of me.
I agree with your overall point, but:
> But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand
That abuse easily goes into the tens of thousands of dollars, even several hundred thousand, even at a relatively small shop. I just took a quick look at Apple's store, and wow! The most expensive 14" MacBook Pro I could configure (minus extra software) tops out at a little over $7,000! The cheapest is at $1,600, and a more reasonably-specced, mid-range machine (that is probably perfectly sufficient for dev work), can be had for $2,600.
Let's even round that up to $3,000. That's $4,000 less than the high end. Even just one crazy-specced laptop purchase would max out your "capped out at a few thousand" figure.
And we're maybe not even talking about abuse all the time. An employee might fully earnestly believe that they will be significantly more productive with a spec list that costs $4,000, when in reality that $3,000 will be more or less identical for them.
Multiply these individual choices out to a 20 or 40 or 60 person team, and that's real money, especially for a small startup. And we haven't even started talking about monitors and fancy ergonomic chairs and stuff. 60 people spending on average $2,000 each more than they truly need to spend will cost $120k. (And I've worked at a place that didn't eliminate their "buy whatever you think you'll need" policies until they had more than 150 employees!)
Just to do web development? I regularly go into swap running everything I need on my laptop. Ideally I'd have VScode, webpack, and jest running continuously. I'd also occasionally need playwright. That's all before I open a chrome tab.
This explains a lot about why the modern web is the way it is.
I do think a lot of software would be much better if all devs were working on hardware that was midrange five years ago and over a flaky WiFi connection.
Always amuses me when I see someone use web development as an example like this. Web dev is very easily in the realm of game dev as far as required specs for your machine, otherwise you're probably not doing much actual web dev. If anything, engineers doing nothing but running little Java or Python servers don't need anything more than a PI and a two-color external display to do their job.
What would be a good incentivizing strategy to prevent over spending on hardware? I can think of giving a budget and the amount not spend is payed out to them (but when the salary is that high it might not make sense) or like having a internal dashboard where everybody can see every body’s spending on hardware, so people feel bad when they order to much.
Probably better to just request an unreviewed but detailed justification, and then monitor spend and police the outliers after the fact (or when requesting above an invisible threshold, e.g. any fully-specced Apple products).
The outliers will likely be two kinds:
1) People with poor judgement or just an outright fraudulent or entitled attitude. These people should be watched for performance issues and managed out as needed. And their hardware reclaimed.
2) People that genuinely make use of high end hardware, and likely have a paper trail of trying to use lower-end hardware and showing that it is inefficient.
This doesn't stop the people that overspend slightly so that they are not outliers, but those people are probably not doing substantial damage.
FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself."
Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers.
Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need.
Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.
iOS development is still mostly local which is why most of the iOS developers at my previous Big Tech employer got Mac Studios as compiler machines in addition to their MacBook Pros. This requires director approval but is a formality.
I read Google is now issuing Chromebooks instead of proper computers to non-engineers, which has got to be corrosive to productivity and morale.
Google issued Chromebooks are not crap with 2GB RAM and Celeron. There were even engineers who voluntarily preferred them. From a security standpoint they are superb.
If you're not a developer and everything you need for your job runs in a browser, what's wrong with a Chromebook?
And has the upside of not having to force an antivirus or Crowdstrike or similar corporate spyware.
> Chromebooks ... to non-engineers
"AI" (Plus) Chromebooks?
Google used to be so un-cheap they had a dedicated ergo lab room where you could try out different keyboards.
They eventually became so cheap they blanket paused refreshing developer laptops...
Yahoo was cheap/stingy/cost concious as hell. They still had a well stocked ergo team, at least for the years I was there. You'd schedule an ergo consult during new hire orientation, and you'd get a properly sized seat and your desk height adjusted if needed and etc. Lots of ergo keyboards, although I didn't see a lot of kinesis back then.
Proper ergo is a cost concious move. It helps keep your employees able to work which saves on hiring and training. It reduces medical expenses, which affects the bottom line because large companies are usually self-insured; they pay a medical insurance company only to administer the plan, not for insurance --- claims are paid from company money.
Some BigCos would benefit from <Brand> version numbers to demarcate changes in corporate leadership, culture and fiscal policy.
The soft cap thing seems like exactly this kind of penny-foolish behavior though. I’ve seen people spend hours trying to optimize their travel to hit the cap — or dealing with flight changes, etc that come from the “expense the flight later” model.
All this at my company would be a call or chat to the travel agent (which, sure, kind of a pain, but they also paid for dedicated agents so wait time was generally good).
> sometimes with 8GB RAM
Apple have long thought that 8Gb ram is good enough for anything, and will continue to for some time now.
Not sure what you are talking about re amzn.
I have a pretty high end MacBook Pro, and that pales in comparison to the compute I have access to.
The OP was talking beyond just compute hardware. Stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1jusbj2/amazon...
That’s fair criticism. I only corrected the hardware aspect of it all.
All of OPs posts in that thread are blatantly Chat GPT output
Because.. em-dashes? As many others have mentioned, ios/mac have auto em-dashes so it's not really a reliable indicator.
It’s so annoying that we’ve lost a legit and useful typographic convention just because some people think that AI overusing it means that all uses indicate AI.
Sure, I’ve stopped using em-dashes just to avoid the hassle of trying to educate people about a basic logical fallacy, but I reserve the right to be salty about it.
I find adding some typos and 1 or 2 bad grammer things lets you get away with whatever you want
> 1 or 2 bad grammer things
1 or 2 bed gamer things
Several things:
1) Em-dashes
2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure
3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long
>1) Em-dashes
>3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long
Proper typography and hamburger paragraphs are canceled now because of AI? So much for what I learned high school english class.
>2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure
This is a pretty weak point because it's n=1 (you can check OP's comment history and it's not repeated there), and that phrase is far more common in regular prose than some of the more egregious ones (eg. "delve").
You sound like a generated message from a corporate reputation AI defense bot
How do you know someone worked at Google?
Don’t worry, they’ll tell you
> Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself."
So people started slacking off, because "you have to love your employees"?
It's straightforward to measure this; start a stopwatch every time your flow gets interrupted by waiting for compilation or your laptop is swapping to keep the IDE and browser running, and stop it once you reach flow state again.
We managed to just estimate the lost time and management (in a small startup) was happy to give the most affected developers (about 1/3) 48GB or 64GB MacBooks instead of the default 16GB.
At $100/hr minimum (assuming lost work doesn't block anyone else) it doesn't take long for the upgrades to pay off. The most affected devs were waiting an hour a day sometimes.
This applies to CI/CD pipelines too; it's almost always worth increasing worker CPU/RAM while the reduction in time is scaling anywhere close to linearly, especially because most workers are charged by the minute anyway.
"even the rich FANG types"
I think you wanted to say "especially". You're exchanging clearly measurable amounts of money for something extremely nebulous like "developer productivity". As long as the person responsible for spend has a clear line of view on what devs report, buying hardware is (relatively) easy to justify.
Once the hardware comes out of a completely different cost center - a 1% savings for that cost center is promotion-worthy, and you'll never be able to measure a 1% productivity drop in devs. It'll look like free money.
With compiler development work, a low end machine will do just fine, as long as it has a LARGE monitor. (Mine is 3840x2160, and I bought a satellite monitor to extend it.)
P.S. you can buy a satellite monitor often for $10 from the thrift store. The one I bought was $10.
I don't buy used keyboards because they are dirty and impossible to clean.
> highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse.
Why is that abuse? Having many open browser tabs is perfectly legitimate.
Arguably they should switch from Chrome to Safari / lobby Google to care about client-side resource use, but getting as much RAM as possible also seems fine.
This is especially relevant now that docker has made it easy to maintain local builds of the entire app (fe+be). Factor in local AI flows and the RAM requirements explode.
I have a whisper transcription module running at all times on my Mac. Often, I'll have a local telemetry service (langfuse) to monitor the 100s of LLM calls being made by all these models. With AI development it isnt uncommon to have multiple background agents hogging compute. I want each of them to be able to independently build + host and test their changes. The compute load apps up quickly. And I would never push agent code to a cloud env (not even a preview env) because I don't trust them like that and neither should you.
Anything below an M4 pro 64GB would be too weak for my workflow. On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up.
This workflow is the first time I have needed multiple screens. Pre-agentic coding, I was happy to work on a 14 inch single screen machine with standard thinkpad x1 specs. But, the world has changed.
> On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up.
AMD's Strix Halo can have up to 128GB of unified RAM, I think. The bandwidth is less than half the Mac one, but it's probably going to accelerate.
Windows doesn't inherently care about this part of the hardware architecture.
Isn't it about equal treatment? You can't buy one person everything they want, just because they have high salary, otherwise the employee next door will get salty.
I previously worked at a company where everyone got a budget of ~$2000. The only requirement was you had to get a mac (to make it easier on IT I assume), the rest was up to you. Some people bought a $2000 macbook pro, some bought a $600 mac mini and used the rest on displays and other peripherals.
Equality doesn't have to mean uniformity.
I saw this tried ones and it didn’t work.
Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things.
So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.
I mean; looks like someone volunteered to make the product work on low spec machines. That's needed.
I've been on teams where corporate hardware is all max spec, 4-5 years ahead of common user hardware, provided phones are all flagships replaced every two years. The product works great for corporate users, but not for users with earthly budgets. And they wonder how competitors swallow market in low income countries.
> I mean; looks like someone volunteered to make the product work on low spec machines. That's needed.
The developer integration tests don’t need to run on a low spec machine. That is not needed.
That's probably another reason why we were limited to a set menu of computer options.
I've often wondered how a personal company budget would work for electrical engineers.
At one place I had a $25 no question spending limit, but sank a few months trying to buy a $5k piece of test equipment because somebody thought maybe some other tool could be repurposed to work, or we used to have one of those but it's so old the bandwidth isn't useful now, or this project is really for some other cost center and I don't work for that cost center.
Turns out I get paid the same either way.
If we're talking about rich faang type companies, no, it's not about equal treatment. These companies can afford whatever hardware is requested. This is probably true of most companies.
Where did this idea about spiting your fellow worker come from?
That doesn’t matter. If I’m going to spend 40% of my time alive somewhere, you bet a requirement is that I’m not working on ridiculously outdated hardware. If you are paying me $200k a year to sit around waiting for my PC to boot up, simply because Joe Support that makes 50k would get upset, that’s just a massive waste of money.
I don't think so. I think mostly just keeping spend down in aggregate.
Not providing 2 monitors to those who want is hare-brained. As far as I'm concerned, 2 monitors = 2x more efficient working.