Most relevant bit for geeks: "Build/buy your dream computer."
Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't understand why so many companies are reluctant to do this.
This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill.
I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer.
Sadly this is rather common.
My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.
It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.
Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.
Except there was photoshop involved.
And a solitary 15" monitor.
And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).
After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
We'd kill for 'business desktop' machines. We have left-over HP tower servers, some of which were customer returns.
But we have TWO MONITORS!!! as the recruiter who got me in here pointed out.
Personally, I bring in my MacBook Pro and hook it up to one of my TWO MONITORS!!! because it's a much better environment than the rubbish tower server they gave me.
Well you could kill for the business desktop machines at my prior job, but it would be like killing someone for their socks.
1GB RAM powerhouses with 5400 RPM disks.
I lobbied hard for 6 months, doing research for them, laying out how little it would cost to buy new machines, and an additional monitor for all the developers, going so far as to do benchmarks of our software on my home machine (consumer-level $1200 Core i7) compared to the work cast-offs.
I quit when it was clear they did not care about the concerns of the developers at all, just cared for milking the sole golden goose.
But managers who did little more than PowerPoint, Outlook and surfing the net got budget to upgrade their laptops to specs that outclassed any machine the engineers had, it was pretty depressing.
Our hardware is sourced from a local supplier who specializes in gamer builds. The cooling is top notch so we thought we'd run a couple of machines at 3.5Ghz.
We're a medium-sized startup with a rocking VP of engineering, so there's no push to "standardize" on shitty HP or Dell machines, thank god.
Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
I'd add "modulo the live site", but when I needed that, it was made available.
I think of this as the computer equivalent of the HP story of one of the founders using an axe to break into a storage closet so engineers had access to equipment over the weekend.
> Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
Good god, I don't even want root on every box. If I've got root on something, that means I'm responsible for it. I don't want to own that many resources, because then I have to worry about them.
is the standard outsourced and absolutely terrible job database search.
No offense intended but based on your career section alone I would never apply there. I might apply if I met people at a networking event and they convinced me but definitely not based on your site info.
I thought Tarsnap would be handing out S&W Model 500s as corporate swag for internship applicants.
At least seems like that kind of place from the outside: jail yard metal table, BSD boxen, a Colombian silver Peso, K&R and Plauger, bottle o' jack, dot-matrix printouts of kernel panics, cute unmentionables left by last night's mistaken young thang .. "This is Tarsnap, Asok. You can break hearts but you can't break servers."
Yeah, I wonder who cleans up after this. The guy who has root "just because we give it to all developers" and makes a mess and seriously breaks the production site is most likely not the person you want cleaning it up when time is of the essence.
If you are in a company that does not allow it, at least get them to install VirtualBox or some other virtualisation program. (Or quit. But I understand real life is made of compromises.)
Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
I generally find the quality of multiprocessing in the guest OS is not good; nor is accelerated graphics. Most VMs are ok if all you need is single proc non visual performance, though.
An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
Sadly, the whole dropbox site is blocked by the firewall at the client I am currently supporting (and they gave me a 15" monitor). Craziest though is they only allow Firefox 2.0- I keep sending them the vulnerabilities list. I run chromium instead...
Comments
Most relevant bit for geeks: "Build/buy your dream computer."
Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't understand why so many companies are reluctant to do this.
This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill.
I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer.
Sadly this is rather common.
My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.
It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.
Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.
Except there was photoshop involved.
And a solitary 15" monitor.
And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).
After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
We'd kill for 'business desktop' machines. We have left-over HP tower servers, some of which were customer returns.
But we have TWO MONITORS!!! as the recruiter who got me in here pointed out.
Personally, I bring in my MacBook Pro and hook it up to one of my TWO MONITORS!!! because it's a much better environment than the rubbish tower server they gave me.
Well you could kill for the business desktop machines at my prior job, but it would be like killing someone for their socks.
1GB RAM powerhouses with 5400 RPM disks.
I lobbied hard for 6 months, doing research for them, laying out how little it would cost to buy new machines, and an additional monitor for all the developers, going so far as to do benchmarks of our software on my home machine (consumer-level $1200 Core i7) compared to the work cast-offs.
I quit when it was clear they did not care about the concerns of the developers at all, just cared for milking the sole golden goose.
But managers who did little more than PowerPoint, Outlook and surfing the net got budget to upgrade their laptops to specs that outclassed any machine the engineers had, it was pretty depressing.
Luxury .... We used to have to get up 10mins before we went to sleep, toggle the OS into a turing machine with our teeth and pay SAP for doing it.....
Your company overclocks your workstations? What's the story behind that?
Our hardware is sourced from a local supplier who specializes in gamer builds. The cooling is top notch so we thought we'd run a couple of machines at 3.5Ghz.
We're a medium-sized startup with a rocking VP of engineering, so there's no push to "standardize" on shitty HP or Dell machines, thank god.
Pfft. "root on your box" is so last week.
Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
I'd add "modulo the live site", but when I needed that, it was made available.
I think of this as the computer equivalent of the HP story of one of the founders using an axe to break into a storage closet so engineers had access to equipment over the weekend.
(blah blah blah we're hiring blah blah blah)
> Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
Good god, I don't even want root on every box. If I've got root on something, that means I'm responsible for it. I don't want to own that many resources, because then I have to worry about them.
When I saw the "we're hiring" comment I went to check out your site.
I'm sorry to say but your careers section is pretty horrible.
Your About Us page is blank: http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/chronicle
There's
Learn about us in 30 seconds
and
More about us ...
on the right side that seem like they should be links but they aren't.
Your jobs page: http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/jobs
is the standard outsourced and absolutely terrible job database search.
No offense intended but based on your career section alone I would never apply there. I might apply if I met people at a networking event and they convinced me but definitely not based on your site info.
You're totally right.
In fact, we have a project underway to try to make it suck less.
Having said that, if you're anywhere nearby, drop me a line and just come in for lunch. It'll be more compelling than any jobs page we could put up.
I'm in Montreal, definitely not nearby. I'm not looking for a job either I'm just a nosy person. =)
I'll take a rain-check though in case I do someday end up in Newton.
Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.
Ugh. I understand the principle of empowering developers, but some basic security would be nice...
I thought Tarsnap would be handing out S&W Model 500s as corporate swag for internship applicants.
At least seems like that kind of place from the outside: jail yard metal table, BSD boxen, a Colombian silver Peso, K&R and Plauger, bottle o' jack, dot-matrix printouts of kernel panics, cute unmentionables left by last night's mistaken young thang .. "This is Tarsnap, Asok. You can break hearts but you can't break servers."
Yeah, I wonder who cleans up after this. The guy who has root "just because we give it to all developers" and makes a mess and seriously breaks the production site is most likely not the person you want cleaning it up when time is of the essence.
If you are in a company that does not allow it, at least get them to install VirtualBox or some other virtualisation program. (Or quit. But I understand real life is made of compromises.)
Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
I generally find the quality of multiprocessing in the guest OS is not good; nor is accelerated graphics. Most VMs are ok if all you need is single proc non visual performance, though.
Disk IO is often poor too.
An SSD + 4 cores made the difference for me to finally move my Linux "box" into a VM and not look back. But again, I'm also just doing terminals, vim, and Chrome.
I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
Yes, scheduling on multiple virtual processors is still not really a solved problem.
Sadly, the whole dropbox site is blocked by the firewall at the client I am currently supporting (and they gave me a 15" monitor). Craziest though is they only allow Firefox 2.0- I keep sending them the vulnerabilities list. I run chromium instead...
Hmmm... what would it take to drive half a dozen 30" monitors?
A Mac Pro with two ATI Radeon HD 5770's gives you 4 Mini Display Port and 2 Dual-Link DVI outputs.
Build/buy your dream computer.
What's the limit tho?
Since they used computer in singular, you probably can't build a cluster.
Sorry, I meant price.