Saving lost developer time with better hardware
5 Oct, 2008 | Written by Frank Carver | under Information
It can sometimes seem hard to overcome real or imagined objections to a need for improved hardware. There often seems to be an assumption that developers all just want the shiniest toys and that the job of management and company finance is to save expenditure by curbing that desire.
As developers, maybe we should get more practice making sensible business cases for the times when hardware improvements really make sense.
Kris Kemper » Blog Archive » Saving lost developer time with better hardware
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
Robert | October 6th, 2008 at 01:37 #
Developer costs (inc. overhead) ~= $100,000/year ~= $2000/week ~= $50/hour
Better hardware costs ~= $4000 (or about $2000 vs cheap hardware)
Time lost to slow builds, juggling insufficient memory, etc = ~2hrs/week ~= $100/week
Productivity improvement from things like larger monitors, etc = ~5% ~= $100/week
Total improvement from better hardware ~= $200/week.
Time to re-coup investment => 20 weeks (for differential price) or 40 weeks (for full price, if you’ve already got the cheap hardware)
The rest of the business case is about justifying the various numbers.