When I was last looking for a fully remote job, a lot of companies gave you a “technology allowance” every few years where they give you money to buy a computer/laptop. You could buy whatever you wanted but you had that fixed allowance. The computer belonged to you and you connected to their virtual desktops for work.
Honestly, I see more companies going in this direction. My work laptop has an i7 and 16GB of RAM. All I do is use Chrome.
It’d be nice to have that - yeah. My company issued me a laptop that only had 16gb of RAM to try and build Android projects.
Idk if you know Gradle builds but a multi module project regularly consumes 20+GB of ram during a build. Despite the cost difference being paid for in productivity gains within a month it took 6 months and a lot of fighting to get a 32gb laptop.
My builds immediately went from 8-15 minutes down to 1-4.
I always felt that this is where cloud computing should be. If you’re not building all the time, then 32GB is overkill.
I know most editing and rendering of TV shows happen on someone’s computer and not in the cloud but wouldn’t it be more efficient to push the work to the cloud where you can create instances with a ton of RAM?
I have to believe this is a thing. If it isn’t, someone should take my idea and then give me a slice.
It’s how big orgs like Google do it, sure. Working there I had 192gb of ram on my cloudtop.
That’s not exactly reducing the total spend on dev ram though - quite the opposite. It’s getting more ram than you can fit in a device available to the devs.
But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t bitch and moan about “always on internet connections” and simultaneously push for an always on internet connected IDE to do your builds.
I want to be able to work offline whenever I need to. That’s not possible if my resource starved terminal requires an Internet connection to run.
Alternatively they could just use Windows VDI and give you a card + card reader that allows Remote Desktop Connection to avoid this hardware cost, like what my company is doing. Sigh
When I was last looking for a fully remote job, a lot of companies gave you a “technology allowance” every few years where they give you money to buy a computer/laptop. You could buy whatever you wanted but you had that fixed allowance. The computer belonged to you and you connected to their virtual desktops for work.
Honestly, I see more companies going in this direction. My work laptop has an i7 and 16GB of RAM. All I do is use Chrome.
It’d be nice to have that - yeah. My company issued me a laptop that only had 16gb of RAM to try and build Android projects.
Idk if you know Gradle builds but a multi module project regularly consumes 20+GB of ram during a build. Despite the cost difference being paid for in productivity gains within a month it took 6 months and a lot of fighting to get a 32gb laptop.
My builds immediately went from 8-15 minutes down to 1-4.
I always felt that this is where cloud computing should be. If you’re not building all the time, then 32GB is overkill.
I know most editing and rendering of TV shows happen on someone’s computer and not in the cloud but wouldn’t it be more efficient to push the work to the cloud where you can create instances with a ton of RAM?
I have to believe this is a thing. If it isn’t, someone should take my idea and then give me a slice.
It’s how big orgs like Google do it, sure. Working there I had 192gb of ram on my cloudtop.
That’s not exactly reducing the total spend on dev ram though - quite the opposite. It’s getting more ram than you can fit in a device available to the devs.
But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t bitch and moan about “always on internet connections” and simultaneously push for an always on internet connected IDE to do your builds.
I want to be able to work offline whenever I need to. That’s not possible if my resource starved terminal requires an Internet connection to run.
Ram is dirt cheap and only getting cheaper.
“Use cloud if available”?
Alternatively they could just use Windows VDI and give you a card + card reader that allows Remote Desktop Connection to avoid this hardware cost, like what my company is doing. Sigh
If the job is fully remote, then the workers could be living on the other side of the country. Using remote desktop with 100ms of latency is not fun.