The value of time.

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I’ll never understand how some people in IT departments don’t grasp the value of a developers time. Its a false economy to provide anything but the absolute fastest PC for a developer. I’m not really sure where the real problem lies. Is it that non-techie people rise to management positions without realising what precisely their reports are doing?

Take the current client. We’re working on incredibly old PC’s – P4’s with 2gb of ram and 40gb.  DevStudio is simply un-useable. I don’t care what the minimum supported spec says, it’s painful. We’ve managed to get some new PC’s ordered, but in most other places its simply not that easy. We still have to justify why we’d like large monitors for example.

Who creates those kinds of obstacles? How they *know* what size monitor I’ll need?

There’s plenty of supporting evidence for productivity gains for using multiple monitors, check out Jeff Attwoods blog for well over 10 posts on this subject alone. In fact check out Jeff’s own setup.

Personally I use dual 24”  Samsung 245B’s. But try explaining this to some guy in procurement who’s sitting in front of his own single little 19” monitor and you’re in for a struggle. Maybe its because monitors are something tangible that they can actually compare the dimensions, so maybe the question “why would anyone need a larger monitor than mine?” creeps into their heads, whereas they can’t easily measure something like ram size or cpu speed.

With our current PC’s the edit-compile-debug feedback loop takes way too long, and when the build is finished the PC takes at least 20 seconds to become responsive again. The project isn’t very large, a web project with a separate DAL and a unit test project. Still it takes what seems like a decade to complete a single build. By comparison my home machine takes less than 5 seconds.

Consider building the code an average of 100 times a day. This is not unreasonable, it equates to roughly one compile every 5 minutes. Not a massive amount when a project is in full flow. Yet if I’m wasting 20 seconds for those 100 builds then that soon mounts up to a total of over 1/2 an hour. If the build is taking 1 minute instead of 20 seconds I’m wasting over an hour a day waiting for my PC to catch up. Sum that over a week and you’re losing almost a whole day. Over a month, that’s almost a week. in my case this is currently WAY worse. A typical build will take over 3 minutes.

Suddenly when you start totalling up all those wasted seconds it starts costing significant amounts. At an average contract rate of £40 an hour that’s over a thousand pounds a month you’d be burning, all over the cost of a 500 quid PC. If the contract lasts for year.. well, you do the math.

But there’s something more insidious here, and i fell into the trap this very morning. I block copied some code <yes, gasp>, a single line, setting up an OracleParameter for a query. Now this parameter did fit entirely on the width of my tiny monitor. The trouble is as I edited the start of the line the text pushed off the right hand side of my monitor. I could no longer see the end of the line. This in itself was not a real problem except that I’d forgotten to edit & remove a bit of code assigning a value, from the end of each of those block copied lines. It took me two subsequent edit-compile-test loops which on this PC took almost 15 minutes to complete, before I discovered what I’d messed up.

Not having the correct equipment leads to a increase in defects.

I’d wasted 15 whole minutes looking for something that I wouldn’t even have done in the first place if I could see the line ends. This only gets worse as you use languages like XAML or ASP where the inserted code sometimes extends beyond even the end of my 24” widescreen. Admittedly solving it is only a code format away but wrapping lines of code sometimes makes it harder to comprehend, and even then its another step that takes time away from you solving the problem at hand.

It’s a false economy believing that using anything but the best possible PC’s for developers is a saving.. The real question is how do you justify all of this to the purse string holders if they don’t realise it themselves?? Sometimes even demonstrating the financial penalties isn’t enough!