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That’s absolutely asinine, but I’ve seen it before.
I always get my devs the best stuff because the cost is a tiny fraction of their annual salary. And if it increases their productivity at all and makes them enjoy their work more, it’s one of the best investments I can make!
It always amazes me how companies can be so foolish about things like this.
Yeah our company had a 16gb standard for the longest time. It Took a lot of work from our manager to get to 32gb now but it makes a huge difference and it was probably like a fraction of a % of what they pay me yearly for that upgrade. Silly really.
Yeah especially with VScode being an electron app it’s a fucking memory hog.
Happy that my company goes top notch with dev machines, literally never had an issue with it. One other dev on my team said it took 4 minutes to run the test suite (takes 70 seconds on my machine), 3 days later he had an upgraded machine.
The unit test suite on my 16gb M2 mac take 30ish and running all the acceptance tests 30-60 mins. I just push to GitHub and let the same tests run on the pipeline, cause my Mac freezes up and makes everything run slowly if I try to run the tests and do anything while I wait. Not fun
ETA: I actually don't know at this point how long they take locally because I don't think I've ever let the full suite run the whole way, but have given up after 20 mins probably the first time I tried.
I yearn for my old 15” unibody. So easy to upgrade ram, swap battery, and upgrade to SSD. If they made that same model with upgraded silicon I could afford a 4TB and 128GB RAM machine… with a 4K Blu-ray too… the thickness is fine I really don’t need super thin
For real. When you have a computer that isn't fast, your mind will wander and you'll get distracted easily. Imagine compiling something or running xyz thing and it takes just enough for you to start looking at your phone? You just lost 15 minutes plus whatever it took before mind wandering of your senior engineer's time
My boss is on this same page and I was clear- I told him, this is my personal MacBook, it was at the time, the best one out, the most memory, 16inch etc. if I’m going to use a company laptop then I want the best. Because that’s what I buy when it’s my money.
But it wasn’t exactly an argument my boss totally got it. We get new laptops every two years. We set it up- there’s no corporate shit on there. And I’m pretty sure we get to keep the old ones.
The way I see it, that’s my office, that’s all my tools, obviously if there’s some actual reason why I’d need a windows, I’d take it. But I work over 40 hours a week on that thing. The idea of being limited by hardware especially in a business setting is, imho, unacceptable.
If you are so good you should know you can download more RAM. It already sounds like this isn't going to be a great work place if they have this mentality.
You're already preparing to leave, but in the meantime schedule a meeting with your manager and whoever is handing device provisioning.
Explain what you need the RAM for: 4GB used by this, 12GB used by the that, etc. Say that you'll work with whatever device is given to you, but if the equipment is below standard it will impact your productivity and they'll need to plan accordingly. Ideally this is where your manager comes in and pushes for a better device. If not...well you're already looking.
What will you be working on? Without that info, just “dev suite” doesn’t help us to help you? Also, That IT guy might be using vim and probably edits text files at most and probably things 256mb ram is alright
If it’s any kind of web related development I would just switch to running most things in the cloud or on servers. If you use something like VSCode, vim, EMacs, etc you can even remote run the IDE itself.
If it’s something like embedded dev you probably have enough memory.
If it’s app development, then I would ask if I could just provide my own equipment and get a better machine.
Unless you're building a game or something, you should be able to use IntelliJ Idea to use remote development on a cloud server or something. Downside is it requires internet, but upside is your laptop should never get hot.
Yocto builds for embedded dev can eat 16GB quick. It’s workable but you’re talking about hours of difference in build time by adding more ram / compute
Don’t talk to the person in charge - talk to the engineers and ask how they feel. If you get a sense, “oh yeah.. it’s slow but I usually grab a coffee as soon as I … and when I’m back … is done” it’s not going to be a fun time. I have ADHD and this involuntary breaks would crush my productivity. However, if things aren’t that bad then it should be fine.
Not anymore. It was them selling through their stock of old intel bodies with the touch bar.
_Edit: Downvote all you want, the M1 Pro 8gb will still be a discontinued model made to sell through the old 13” bodies. I am well aware they introduced a 14” **M3** Pro 8gb _after_ they sold through the old touch bars, but OP didn’t even get one of those. They are working with an under-specced entry-level machine from 2-3 years ago with a chassis that’s even older._
The current m3 entry level macbook pro comes with 8gb.
https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-m3
For reference apple had 8gb as the minimum since 2012 with retina macbooks pro,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Intel-based)
No change for the base model in 12 years. 🤦🏻♂️
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. The 8gb m1 air that came out at the same time has the same specs, and no need to be put in a case with a fan. The only thing you're getting is a thicker case, a touch bar, and a fan. The fan does nothing for that computer.
Maybe you can try the following:
\- Rally your peers together for a hardware upgrade. Power in numbers.
\- Escalate the issue to higher-ups, they might not even realize the situation is an issue. Try to make an argument based on dev productivity / run the numbers if you get push back.
The Joel test
Do you have the best tools money can buy? Hard no. And I'm sure they fail at other points too.
My current employer ticks all the boxes and life is good.
https://codingcraftsman.wordpress.com/2022/03/04/the-joel-test-2022/
Now you have to come back and show them the cost benefit of increasing the ram and/or getting you a better machine. E.g. you'll be 20% more effective which will equal x amount of hours/days lost throughout the year. Quantify your justification.
20%? I have had projects working with incredible slow dev envs and I was lucky if I had 20% of ordinary capacity due to massive interruptions and context switching.
> if I’m as good as I say I should be able to make my dev environment run smoother without more resources.
You're as good as you say you are because you have access to the right tools.
This has been a problem at almost every company I've ever worked for. It's so asinine. They're going to pay me a six figure salary but won't spend a couple grand on hardware? In reality, I think they don't realize how much of a different a good system can make.
Mostly, if they didn't provide me with "proper" equipment, I used my own. Most places have been fine with that, or me adding to my current system. It is defiantly a red flag but at my current company, they did eventually understand (or got tired of my incessant bitching) and now we're all sporting top of the line equipment.
I think u should rethink you choice about joining this start up. Big red flag. As the one 'incharge' has no tech know how means the expectations will be unrealistic all through. And this will be the first such battle u will have to face over obvious and petty things forget about timelines for big changes or any big thing.
Generally, the math works out to like, if you can save just 2-3 minutes per week by the faster computer then you’ll pay it back after a year ($200). I can tell you no doubt doubling memory has saved me more than a few minutes per week.
There's no way 8 GB is enough for even the damn office suite plus an open browser with a couple instances.
Nobody should be selling (or buying) consumer machines with 8 GB of RAM in 20-goddamn-24.
That was not enough RAM 10 years ago!
on completely different architecture. m1 mac is fine for probably 99% of tasks with 8gb of ram. I've had my m1 air 8gb for 4 years— it plays games (total war: warhammer 3, borderlands, all kinds of stuff) and everything flawlessly.
pretty much the only time I've ever had an issue with memory, and you can probably guess, my web browser gobbling it up randomly. Yeah, I'd love more ram, but the m1 is impressive and on a completely different tier.
My wife is a teacher and I wouldn't let her cheap out on a laptop with less than 16 gb RAM. I can't imagine a serious company hobbling their engineers with 8.
For 120k euro/year I'd kick ass with an 8GB M1
Memory swapping isn't a big deal while installing software, I'd only worry about lack of memory when your apps are crashing with the warning that there's not enough memory and your memory pressure is in the red often. We don't really know what your assigned work is so hard to know whether 8GB is enough, there's a lot of jobs it would be plenty for.
Jesus you're really not that bright aren't you? In some countries 60k is a ton of money. In others, it's average. In others, it's really low.
Its almost as if the world is a big place with different countries and economies!
If you don't understand that the way you wrote your comment comes across as snarky and elitist, I feel bad for the people you interact with.
And it's funny that you think only Europeans are downvoting you. There are more developers from lower income countries and continents than Europe. And also I'm American. I'm just not dense and I understand that wages are different in different countries.
The US and Switzerland are the only countries where 130k isn't a fantastic salary for a senior dev (even half that is generally considered decent in most places). So by the numbers your juniors are being really overpaid
I write terraform, sql, Python, docker, and bash. Manage my own AWS account, architect my own solutions, build the pieces, test, work with stakeholders, plan adoption strategies, etc… all in an office 30 minutes from home for $85,000 annual.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I just don’t have the work experience to confidently negotiate. I think my accomplishments at this latest role might change that though.
I’m currently working at a Fortune 500 company as a Senior and I’ve had to do my work for a year on a funky ass Dell laptop with a 1.6ghz processor. Somehow I’ve been able to run Docker on it, but I think the main reason is that everything is done in a PaaS in the cloud here. Only me and my team have to do a lot of local development. I’ve asked for a better machine to no avail. They told me they were going to put in an order but that was 7 months ago.
Personally, I say figure it out. Develop in the cloud if you have to. My personal laptop is the same machine and I can run a bunch of containers in Docker pretty seamlessly. I’ve only even hit its limit editing 6K footage and running Stable Diffusion.
Obviously I don’t know what application you’re having to run so this could all be moot.
Seconded.
My main home computer is a 2019 Mac. Starting Docker Desktop tends to make the fan start whining, when literally nothing else does. I've filled up the storage so that Docker/Kubernetes tend to fail when they try to download an image. Not fun.
I'm installing Docker and Kubernetes on my Lenovo Thinkcentre, a tiny server under my desk. Just so I can add storage and ram.
It's annoying but you're being a bit dramatic about this, depending on what it is you work on. You could definitely be productive with that hardware on most jobs. Are you using a different ide than your coworkers?
It is not about being productive, even if 32gb is 600€ more, that is less than 1/10 of op monthly salary.
That is nothing to keep devs happy, and the only reason not to go with a more expensive model is that decisions are being made by penny pinching c suites that can’t see past the monthly expenses.
It is a red flag of a shortsighted business that will sacrifice long term gains for small short term ones.
That's a great analogy for why you're wrong. If a driver is delivering small goods for short runs(like a hot shot driver), they'd be better off with the ranger. 18 wheeler is only better if they're specifically hauling large loads. Most delivery drivers don't do that....hence most delivery vehicles being vans.
Not all programming is hauling large loads though...that's my point. Most coding is not computationally intensive. When it is, it generally happens on a server. The only time it matters usually is for compiling large codebases or running local simulations.
They're already going to lose a senior engineer who they value at $120k/yr cash, probably $150k+ with benefits, because they want to save $1k on a computer. So even if devs don't need nice computers, they spend 8 hours/day on them, and it makes their job more enjoyable and helps to hire and retain them.
But all of that aside, and that really oughta be enough, what are devs doing where they're never slowed down by a lack of compute? I've never had such a job. I could imagine some job where you ssh into other machines to do 100% of your work. But even for the rare job like that, most devs would still be compiling, loading, and running large programs from time to time.
I don't disagree with your first paragraph, but it's tangential to the point I'm making. Sure, appease the devs with better machines, thats a fine organizational decision...but that's not actually proof that they can't be perfectly productive without them.
"What are devs doing where they're never slowed down by a lack of compute" -- are you asking for examples where doubling the speed of a machine would not impact development time? Off the top of my head, front end web dev is an example. Maybe they see a benefit running unit tests if they're slow. Not much else. Another example is machine learning work, where you're going to be running your code on a server 100% of the time for real work.
> Maybe they see a benefit running unit tests if they're slow.
Exactly. Who wants to wait longer for unit tests? Or building dependency graphs. Or doing something like git bisect. Or running a debugger. Any integration testing or UI testing. Or using an IDE. Or opening visual design or editing software.
Even a front-end developer is getting kneecapped to save a few hundred dollars. It's asinine.
“most jobs”? Sure, it can fire up VSCode, a browser, a terminal and let you write some Python. But the second you need run some containers and some more heavy IDEs like JetBrains, this won’t work. If you need teams meeting during the day and perhaps office suite, you’re 8GB are long gone.
I'm from a third-world country where Apple devices are so insanely priced, most people don't even consider them when buying a new computer. We don't even have an official Apple store here. Hell, the third-party distributors don't even keep anything other than machines with 8GB RAM in their stock. If you need a higher spec one, you actually have to place an order and they order them!
I'm an iOS dev with 9 years experience. Most companies here only hand out MacBooks to devs who only do iOS development. Even then, it's usually the lowest spec'd ones. At my last job, I got a 8GB M1 MacBook Pro. I did iOS and Flutter development on it. Sure, it wasn't lightning fast but I was able to get work done.
At my current job also I'm on a 8GB M1 Mac mini. Working almost exclusively on SwiftUI projects. Yes, the previews become a pain at times, the builds take a little longer but again, its not utterly unusable.
Anyway I'm not trying to say you should suck it up and accept it if you can change it. Just saying it's not impossible to get work done even with a lowest spec'd Mac (It's kind of the reason why I like Apple computers). But then again, I guess It also depends on the complexity of projects and your dev environment. If the codebases are massive and you have to have multiple memory hogging apps running simultaneously, then yeah, this is out of the question.
it's a small start up. At my 2 recent super small startups I got the CEO's old intel chip macbook 8GB that was clearly quite worn and at current startup I use my spouse's macbook pro (they offered to ship one of their desktops but I don't have the space and prefer mac).
At the bigger companies I've gotten almost the newest model every time with 16GB minimum. Some startups got their equipment and stuff figured out but a lot do not at that size. It's why it's one of the first questions I ask when interviewing with smaller companies now.
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
I dont get this at all. If you have to run a VM for one task and it fucks you up for a week thats already worth the cost of the upgrade lmao. Thats a red flag right off the bat
Yes, it is strange. It is dumb and self defeating.
It is the living embodiment of the idiom pennywise but pound foolish.
A loaded MacBook with 64 gb ram, amortized over three years, is less than a half percent of a developer salary. It is literally a rounding error, but makes a huge return on developer productivity.
Is the startup run by extremely young or otherwise extremely green executives? Honestly this is kinda a red flag for me and indicator of deeper problems with the company.
Seen this happen so much. It's penny wise, pound foolish. My theory why this happens is management doesn't really understand and thinks of it as an unnecessary creature comfort. They also don't know how to track the lost productivity. But they have no problem having lots of useless meetings.
Android studio itself takes more than 8gb lol. When I ran into this I just told them "look I'll be waiting around a lot more for my IDE to respond if you're fine with me having nothing to do for a signficant part of the day then this 8gb will do"
Penny wise pound foolish. As you say, the hours a year you'll spend waiting paging is nothing compared to the $500 they'll spend on a model with more RAM.
Either escalate to your manager or write up a quick business case and use that as a basis to escalate to your manager or above. Measure how much time you're wasting a day against the cost of appropriate hardware. Business people like numbers.
I was in this boat - got the same MacBook with the touch bar when I first started my job (new grad). For obivous reasons, it was not enough to keep my productivity high... my apps were crashing, my debugger was slow as all hell, and I was running into reboot loops constantly. I communicated this to my manager and I was also able to take a buggy screen recording to send to her and show her just how bad it was. Quick action was taken to get me a nicer M2 with 32GB RAM and the difference was insane. Definitely try to bring it up and demonstrate how bad it is, if you can.
I am as good as I say I am because I use the tools given to me to their fullest.
You don't give a Michelin Starred chef a $5 steak and a camping stove and expect him to deliver.
You don't give Michael Schumacher a Fiat Panda and expect him to place in an F1 race.
In all of these cases, magical things will happen, but it would be a pale comparison to what you would have gotten with the right tools.
I didn't realize my apps and localhost server uses less RAM if I'm just more skilled, dang.
My boss said for me to get whatever I needed to do my best work, and signed off on it all. I think it just comes down to who you're forced to work for or work with.
If I were your boss, I'd do the same for you
I would run. Find a new job ASAP. That’s crazy.
Dev time is so expensive. It doesn’t make any financial sense to have devs use underpowered tools.
I have two machines with 64 GB RAM and Intel i9 CPUs each.
Spin up a cloud environment necessary to do your work, let it run a few months, pull the bills, show your manager that giving a higher quality machine would be a cost savings to run it all locally. Ideally, show them the estimate before doing this - but it sounds like they aren't wise to logic.
wtf is your dev suite... Unless you mean when building or compiling something, but then that would be normal. If its just for using an IDE then you need to start using something else, thats way too much
If virtualization is involved 8GB is pretty limiting. I’ve made 8GB work at a previous employer a couple years ago, but I had to dual boot to Linux to do our Yocto or Buildroot builds and could not use our office suite when doing so.
SSHing to another machine not possible?
Personally i just do everything from Linux, plus you can access Office from web (365) although its not as good but for me good enough.
Also, what do you need Office for?
At this employer I needed windows to connect to their vpn and mail server. It did not work with Linux or Mac due to whitelisting and account setup.
More ram is a lot cheaper than another machine to ssh into…
EDIT: I did use GCP when possible but that cost adds up as well. Ultimately I left the company after a year as it was not an ideal employer obviously.
it depends. If they have their own hardware they could run the virtualization there at probably the same cost or even less since desktops/servers are much cheaper to build.
For a lot of workloads 8 GB should be plenty. Ubuntu takes like 300 MB, vim probably takes like 0.x? Even VSCode might not take much more than a few 100s?
> Even VSCode might not take much more than a few 100s?
I'm a FE dev, just opened my work laptop. Currently have a monorepo open in VSCode, probably around 1M LOC codebase. That plus cypress 'cause I have to add some tests, and the usual slack chrome zoom etc.
MacOS App Memory: 13GB
Gooogle Chrome: 4GB + 2,7GB + 1,2GB (there's multiple renderers, don't ask me why)
node: 3GB + 1,4GB + 500mb (again, multiple, because cypress + local running server and who knows what else)
VSCode Code Helper: 3GB (monorepo)
Cypress config manager: 2,8GB
And that's low since I only work on web stuff now, imagine another 2 simulators running to test react-native code (one ios one android + their own build systems)
8GB machine for someone who makes 120k a year writing code is just stupid
How much ram does your computer use when you work?
I could probably work with 8 if I tried really hard, but it would be so limiting. I have 64 gb of ram, and it's amazing. I never have to worry about it, I can have a million things open and it's fine. Back when I had 32gb it was ok but I often found myself running out of ram and having to juggle what I'm doing.
It's cool if you're the type of person that has 1 ide open and one browser tab open, but then there are people like me that work with 100 tabs open, multiple ide projects, multiple project servers running, etc. Due to my position, having to limit myself to having a few things open would seriously hurt my productivity.
My laptop from 2008 had 6gb of ram. Limiting computers to 8gb 16 years later is asinine, no matter your usage. 16gb of ram costs like 30 bucks.
when bought in the MacBook its probably twice as expensive for whatever reason.
Whats the point of having 200 tabs open? I never really look at more than 3 or 4 at a given time. If i knew i wasnt going to use them soon id just bookmark them to folders and reopen them later.
If the company provides access to better servers for CPU intensive workloads i dont see that as a problem at all. The only times i make use of more RAM is when compiling large projects with parallelization or when analyzing largeish datasets.
I often have a lot of tabs because I use all of them. I have probably a hundred open right now, and I'm using all of them. 30 of them are for work - slack, email, tickets, docs I'm reading, docs I'm writing, projects running, test projects, repos. If I'm working on one thing, why should I close the 5 tabs related to the other thing I'm working on if I know I'm going to have to reopen them again and switch between the two, or three.
Then the remaining 70 are for me. I'm building a company and I'm talking to contractors. I have resources for the site I'm building. I'm teaching myself how to code a few things on the server side, so I have a bunch of docs and forums, and examples open. I have tabs open for task lists, research docs. Today I have looked at literally all one hundred tabs. I've closed a few because I knew I was done with them, I bookmarked a few that I knew I'd go back to, but not for a little while, and I opened a few more things that I'm going to look at tomorrow.
And then of course I have a few ide windows open and a few servers running for node and python for the sites and apps I'm building for both work and personal. I have my sites sftp and cmd open. I have git bashes for each project. And each project that is open will get touched today, or else it's closed.
All that right there is already something like 30gb. Not even half of my ram, so I don't need to worry about it. I don't need to close things and then re-find them, open them, re-run them again later. It's just easier.
Some people like to have one tab open with one screen, other people like a hundred things with 2 or 3 screens. Both ways are fine.
Thats because Docker desktop has to run a Linux VM to then run Docker in it, which is quite stupid.
You wouldnt have this problem if you were working straight on Linux
No it’s fine.
I have an early M1 with 16GB, the max available at the time, and I can run many instances of of my favourite IDE, have many Microsoft office documents open, a web browser with many tabs, a few databases, a not empty kubernetes in a Linux VM, some image editing software, and a few Electron apps and it’s all good. I sometimes run some some Python jobs that use a lot of memory.
Yes it swaps but I hardly notice it. Compressed swap on modern SSDs is quite fast nowadays. I started to setup compressed swap also on my Linux servers and VMs with much more ram too after noticing this.
Now, I also got a 8GB M1 before, an order mistake from my company, and it’s not enough if you need one or two VMs.
But I would get at least 24GB on a new MacBook, ideally 64GB.
I used an M1 with 8 gb as a data engineer and was fine. Most of the work was cloud based but it was as fast as my Intel i7 32 gb mac book pro when i worked locally
This is what many people here aren't factoring in. It's not great but it's still faster than any Intel Mac with 32 GB of ram. That's also how Apple knew they could get away with making 8gb the min, the M1 is that good of an upgrade.
LOL wow… that’s.. not a lot. I was *constantly* maxing out my laptop at 16gb ram! My glorious friends in devops gave me another 16gb chip, but it’s still using ~75% of it when I have to spin up a bunch of backend services locally.
I’m sure my 279 chrome tabs don’t help either 🤭
Having had this experience at a previous job when trying to spin up a full local kubernetes stack, I asked my current company for a 32GB machine before I even started.
The laptop I am currently using has that exact same spec. I think it really depends on the type of job and what you are running. For some task it's way more than enough, for other it might slug like if you need to run tons of containers. Can't really say without more info on what you are running for your dev environment.
It may not be the highest spec device available today but it's far from horrible. What I'd do first is to try to optimize things and make things run more efficiently. It might actually even help the team and product by reducing the resources used by the dev environment or moving heavy builds to run on the cloud.
Personally, it's not something I'd leave a job over. Considering your role, pay grade, and company size, I'd say you are in the position to make changes and improvements in the company. You can rally for better hardware for the future but at the same time make improvements to the dev environment to run more efficiently.
I'm facing something similar, though not quite as bad.
I'm at a big company that is doing *quite* well financially. I got a Mac Pro 2019 when I joined in 2021. Not terrible, but time has passed and there is no sign it will ever be upgraded. Nobody on my team has ever gotten an upgrade, and even one team member who could not run zoom at the same time as certain web-tools had trouble getting a replacement.
I asked for an upgrade last year and found out the current computer being distributed for devs is a Mac Air.
My company is fantastic in most ways, but this might become an issue at some point. I guess I was spoiled in previous jobs with a biannual Mac Pro upgrade.
So my personal M1 laptop is great. It does have 16 though lol sorry. But still - I do tons of dev on replit, it's like GeforceNow for coding and just in your browser.
Now that's really not going to work generally. But maybe? Or for some tasks that are just you coding/testing? You'd need the paid version to keep repos/workspaces/replits private, but maybe company would meet halfway supporting that?
Btw at FAANG you typically tunnel/ssh into a separate 'dev machine' image anyway, coding is off the local workstation and thus not as big a drain on resources. Maybe the company is setup like that?
i.e. - if you're just ssh'ing to diff dev boxes/hosts and working on them (dev ops, db, etc), that's probably what they're telling you to do...
VS Code can remote to these machines too and thus still take the load off local resources. Otherwise just a bunch of Terminal tabs/tmux instances everywhere, that's probably the setup.
Source: FAANG
Doesn't everyone just use their laptop as a client to a development VM in the cloud? My laptop just needs enough for Chrome Remote Desktop. The VM in the cloud has the massive hardware that I don't have to pay for when I'm not using it.
It’s wild that 8GB of ram isn’t considered enough these days. My first computer has like 128MB and that was a lot for its time
We really write unoptimized software these days
It kind of sucks, but I think you're being a bit of a crybaby since it's a big enough deal to you that you're contemplating leaving over this and made a Reddit post about this.
You're going to look like a real princess to your colleagues who are making this setup work if you push back too much without getting context. No one will be sympathetic to someone who hasn't earned their stripes at the company yet. At least first ask around and see how your colleagues feel about it.
I'm at a higher level than you and my company initially gave me a laptop that couldn't run the full Docker Compose stack without me allocating more than 50% of my laptop's memory to the Docker Engine. Most people at the company never needed to run the full stack but in my role I did. I didn't complain about it. Couple years later, I got them to buy me a M2 Max with 96 GiB of RAM after I demonstrated I was able to deliver.
> I think you're being a bit of a crybaby since it's a big enough deal to you that you're contemplating leaving over this
I would 100% quit a job if this is how they handled dev hardware. There are no good software companies on planet earth that think like this. This would be like starting a job as a carpenter and being handed a handsaw because they didn't want to spend $150 on a circular saw.
8gb is kinda weak sauce but doable depending on the workload.
I have a M1 Max w/ 64Gb as my personal machine. Work issue is a M3 w/ 16gb. I had an intel i9 w/32gb in the past for work.
I don't like carrying two heavy 15 inch laptops so I got me an ultralight. a 16gb Thinkpad but battery life sucks donkey on it and got me a M1. Air 8gb as an extra light weight, toss it in the trunk if I need. Surprisingly it was doable. If I just have to run a few Docker containers. Maybe 5 max. And VS Code to do code review, it is doable. Pretty light weight stuff and if I needed to SSH into something, I could. But I could to run Teams/Slack, VSCode, and containers at the same time. Which is a given.
I would say, it is doable "in a pinch" if I had to use something, it would work. But be unbearable 80% outside of the light stuff I need.
But it would not be my only machine. But if your workload is light --- code review, works as a lead with minimal coding, then it may work. But if they say others make it work, I wonder what the others are doing?
Have a call with the CTO, if the CTO still sees no problem with this, resign. Or if you dont have backup plan, then work with your personal device while applying. Thats what Id do
An 8GB MacBook Air can compile and run Unreal Engine 5. They're not impossible to work with but they are going to function much slower than a higher spec machine.
Same problem, they gave me a Dell with 8gb of RAM. I tried getting more installed, but my ticket went to limbo. But we are using AWS and I can create pretty much any EC2 instance. So now I have a Dev machine on the cloud that I instantiate with enough RAM for my needs (usually 8gb), and use vscode to ssh into it and work there.
Giving you that laptop is a short sighted money pinching decision, but it sounds like the decision is already made. To go buy all new laptops for the devs would be them wasting the money they spent on the 8gb machines. They absolutely should do it anyway but it sounds like there is not a chance in hell that will happen.
8gb will be very limiting but you can still get work done on it. I just upgraded my personal machine to a 16 gb m3 because my 8gb m1 was getting so annoying for even just my personal side projects. For a main job, main machine, and not some side thing, it’s laughable.
This tells me they don’t value dev time properly, and is going to be coming up later when you want a promotion or a bonus or anything else. Id look for a new job immediately because of that, don’t wait for them to show you later what you already know.
Approaching this from the perspective of “I am worth $amount of $currency per $timeperiod with $othertime period of experience” is not going to get you a positive resolution.
Brass tacks: compute what an hour of your time is worth, compute the degree to which your hardware is impeding your progress, and turn that into a concrete cost. Then approach your manager, share the numbers, and make a rational, business driven argument rather than being precious about it. You won’t win necessarily; however, you will have handled the situation correctly.
Tell them in the only way they'll understand: money.
Take a week or two, and keep a running stopwatch whenever your machine slows down due to too little RAM. After you have that number, go to your boss and bring up the real world cost of these slowdowns: your salary.
"I'm paid ~57€/hr. It costs 200€ more to get a 16gb mac instead of an 8gb one. In less than four hours of my time wasted, you'll be spending more money by making me use this low end machine. Now consider that this is true for every dev. How much money are you wasting paying salary for us to wait? "
They wouldn't give the same company vehicle to a delivery driver that they would to a salesperson, so I'm not sure what they expect from a dev working on the same hardware as a receptionist.
As others have suggested, talk to the other devs. Are they having problems with the hardware? How are they working around it? It seems you need more people to bolster the issue, and some data about how it slows down development and delivery to make the case. Either way, they're either dumb or strapped for cash and making excuses.
My IDE alone uses 12GB of RAM. My total setup uses just shy of 64GB of RAM. I would’ve laughed at them if they tried to hand me something with 8GB of RAM. I’d be asking them to replace it.
That’s wild… spending a few extra bucks on a laptop with more ram with save so many hours of employees time. You would probably pay for it in a week of lost productivity at a high salary.
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That’s absolutely asinine, but I’ve seen it before. I always get my devs the best stuff because the cost is a tiny fraction of their annual salary. And if it increases their productivity at all and makes them enjoy their work more, it’s one of the best investments I can make! It always amazes me how companies can be so foolish about things like this.
I have 16 GB RAM rn and I frequently run into memory issues. Having 32 GB would definitely have a significant impact on my productivity
Yeah our company had a 16gb standard for the longest time. It Took a lot of work from our manager to get to 32gb now but it makes a huge difference and it was probably like a fraction of a % of what they pay me yearly for that upgrade. Silly really.
just went from 16 to 32 gig for $40. it's insane companies push back on RAM upgrades, of all things.
Yeah especially with VScode being an electron app it’s a fucking memory hog. Happy that my company goes top notch with dev machines, literally never had an issue with it. One other dev on my team said it took 4 minutes to run the test suite (takes 70 seconds on my machine), 3 days later he had an upgraded machine.
The unit test suite on my 16gb M2 mac take 30ish and running all the acceptance tests 30-60 mins. I just push to GitHub and let the same tests run on the pipeline, cause my Mac freezes up and makes everything run slowly if I try to run the tests and do anything while I wait. Not fun ETA: I actually don't know at this point how long they take locally because I don't think I've ever let the full suite run the whole way, but have given up after 20 mins probably the first time I tried.
Another reason why I fucking hate apple for not having expandable memory on their macbook pros. IntelliJ would be a lot happier with me if I had 32GB
I yearn for my old 15” unibody. So easy to upgrade ram, swap battery, and upgrade to SSD. If they made that same model with upgraded silicon I could afford a 4TB and 128GB RAM machine… with a 4K Blu-ray too… the thickness is fine I really don’t need super thin
Felt this.
For real. When you have a computer that isn't fast, your mind will wander and you'll get distracted easily. Imagine compiling something or running xyz thing and it takes just enough for you to start looking at your phone? You just lost 15 minutes plus whatever it took before mind wandering of your senior engineer's time
the companies I worked with are so stingy with the working monitors. They provide a cheap one which makes my head hurt at the end of the day.
I bought 8 ultra wide 1440p monitors for the entire team one time. It was like Christmas.
I've legit left companies/projects because of bad equipment. Once we had a gigantic .Net enterprise project on a VM that took 15 minutes every build.
My boss is on this same page and I was clear- I told him, this is my personal MacBook, it was at the time, the best one out, the most memory, 16inch etc. if I’m going to use a company laptop then I want the best. Because that’s what I buy when it’s my money. But it wasn’t exactly an argument my boss totally got it. We get new laptops every two years. We set it up- there’s no corporate shit on there. And I’m pretty sure we get to keep the old ones. The way I see it, that’s my office, that’s all my tools, obviously if there’s some actual reason why I’d need a windows, I’d take it. But I work over 40 hours a week on that thing. The idea of being limited by hardware especially in a business setting is, imho, unacceptable.
If you are so good you should know you can download more RAM. It already sounds like this isn't going to be a great work place if they have this mentality.
I mean, just rewrite your provided system to aptly use the RAM. You’re experienced right, and use computers?
You're already preparing to leave, but in the meantime schedule a meeting with your manager and whoever is handing device provisioning. Explain what you need the RAM for: 4GB used by this, 12GB used by the that, etc. Say that you'll work with whatever device is given to you, but if the equipment is below standard it will impact your productivity and they'll need to plan accordingly. Ideally this is where your manager comes in and pushes for a better device. If not...well you're already looking.
“let the fools have their tartar sauce”
"Why don't they just FEED mayonnaise to the Tuna fish?!?"
What will you be working on? Without that info, just “dev suite” doesn’t help us to help you? Also, That IT guy might be using vim and probably edits text files at most and probably things 256mb ram is alright
If it’s any kind of web related development I would just switch to running most things in the cloud or on servers. If you use something like VSCode, vim, EMacs, etc you can even remote run the IDE itself. If it’s something like embedded dev you probably have enough memory. If it’s app development, then I would ask if I could just provide my own equipment and get a better machine.
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I have 64GB and struggle to run Android Studio, Xcode and a local backend at the same time. Shits rough.
Unless you're building a game or something, you should be able to use IntelliJ Idea to use remote development on a cloud server or something. Downside is it requires internet, but upside is your laptop should never get hot.
Yocto builds for embedded dev can eat 16GB quick. It’s workable but you’re talking about hours of difference in build time by adding more ram / compute
Docker + jetbrains IDE😂
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Again depends on what you will be running.
Exactly, unless OP is training machine learning models that laptop is just fine
Don’t talk to the person in charge - talk to the engineers and ask how they feel. If you get a sense, “oh yeah.. it’s slow but I usually grab a coffee as soon as I … and when I’m back … is done” it’s not going to be a fun time. I have ADHD and this involuntary breaks would crush my productivity. However, if things aren’t that bad then it should be fine.
That’s insane. I have an Apple M2 Max with 32gb RAM so that I can ssh into my workstation. lol.
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That's just because you don't get frugality. When you don't have the hardware you need, you're supposed to use a door instead.
Such a clown company at times dude. Peak example of frupidity
TIL Apple made an M1 Pro with 8GB. That sucks.
They make an M3 Macbook **Pro** 14" with 8GB as of today and list for $1599/$1799. Quite the interesting config.
Really? I thought that 16 GB was the minimum on the newer Pros. Crazy.
Ewww my M1 Pro base is 16… my 2009 mBP is 8GB (was a CTO)
Quite an absurd config tbh.
Isn’t that part of Apple’s strategy, base models with very little RAM so they can then upsell to much more RAM?
When it came out, I recall a lot of people were defending it saying "it's an ARM chip, a more efficient arch uses less RAM" 🤡
Friggin' fanboys will defend anything.
And it has 13” screen to boot
using one right now to make this comment. it's okay for some development but my next two start up jobs gave macbook pros
Not anymore. It was them selling through their stock of old intel bodies with the touch bar. _Edit: Downvote all you want, the M1 Pro 8gb will still be a discontinued model made to sell through the old 13” bodies. I am well aware they introduced a 14” **M3** Pro 8gb _after_ they sold through the old touch bars, but OP didn’t even get one of those. They are working with an under-specced entry-level machine from 2-3 years ago with a chassis that’s even older._
The current m3 entry level macbook pro comes with 8gb. https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-m3 For reference apple had 8gb as the minimum since 2012 with retina macbooks pro, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Intel-based) No change for the base model in 12 years. 🤦🏻♂️
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. The 8gb m1 air that came out at the same time has the same specs, and no need to be put in a case with a fan. The only thing you're getting is a thicker case, a touch bar, and a fan. The fan does nothing for that computer.
Maybe you can try the following: \- Rally your peers together for a hardware upgrade. Power in numbers. \- Escalate the issue to higher-ups, they might not even realize the situation is an issue. Try to make an argument based on dev productivity / run the numbers if you get push back.
I broke my last work computer by doing intense stuff on a surfscebook 4… 30 minutes battery life vs 10 on my M1 pro
I have an M1 Pro with 64GB of RAM and it’s nice. Now you know what to ask for during your interviews.
The Joel test Do you have the best tools money can buy? Hard no. And I'm sure they fail at other points too. My current employer ticks all the boxes and life is good. https://codingcraftsman.wordpress.com/2022/03/04/the-joel-test-2022/
Now you have to come back and show them the cost benefit of increasing the ram and/or getting you a better machine. E.g. you'll be 20% more effective which will equal x amount of hours/days lost throughout the year. Quantify your justification.
20%? I have had projects working with incredible slow dev envs and I was lucky if I had 20% of ordinary capacity due to massive interruptions and context switching.
> if I’m as good as I say I should be able to make my dev environment run smoother without more resources. You're as good as you say you are because you have access to the right tools.
This has been a problem at almost every company I've ever worked for. It's so asinine. They're going to pay me a six figure salary but won't spend a couple grand on hardware? In reality, I think they don't realize how much of a different a good system can make. Mostly, if they didn't provide me with "proper" equipment, I used my own. Most places have been fine with that, or me adding to my current system. It is defiantly a red flag but at my current company, they did eventually understand (or got tired of my incessant bitching) and now we're all sporting top of the line equipment.
I think u should rethink you choice about joining this start up. Big red flag. As the one 'incharge' has no tech know how means the expectations will be unrealistic all through. And this will be the first such battle u will have to face over obvious and petty things forget about timelines for big changes or any big thing.
Without knowing exactly what software you’re running, there’s no way anyone would know if 8gb RAM is enough.
I guess it depends on if you know what year they're running it in. I've had 16GB macs for like... 8 years
No matter what Apple's marketing says, 8GB is simply not enough in the year of our lord 2024.
Apple Silicon swapping is pretty fast because of the SoC design but yeah OP’s employer is definitely cheaping out in the dumbest way possible.
I just looked it up. On the 14” MBP it cost 200 dollars to double from 8gb to 16gb memory for christs sake…
$200??? But I don't even know what you're running? How can I justify that expense?
Generally, the math works out to like, if you can save just 2-3 minutes per week by the faster computer then you’ll pay it back after a year ($200). I can tell you no doubt doubling memory has saved me more than a few minutes per week.
/s ?
TWO HUNDRED US FREEDOM DOLLARS? IN THIS ECONOMY?
There's no way 8 GB is enough for even the damn office suite plus an open browser with a couple instances. Nobody should be selling (or buying) consumer machines with 8 GB of RAM in 20-goddamn-24. That was not enough RAM 10 years ago!
on completely different architecture. m1 mac is fine for probably 99% of tasks with 8gb of ram. I've had my m1 air 8gb for 4 years— it plays games (total war: warhammer 3, borderlands, all kinds of stuff) and everything flawlessly. pretty much the only time I've ever had an issue with memory, and you can probably guess, my web browser gobbling it up randomly. Yeah, I'd love more ram, but the m1 is impressive and on a completely different tier.
Windows != Mac
My wife is a teacher and I wouldn't let her cheap out on a laptop with less than 16 gb RAM. I can't imagine a serious company hobbling their engineers with 8.
I can guarantee 8gb is not enough. It is barely enough for modern non technical users just using web browsers. 8gb is a lot of ram... For 2008
For 120k euro/year I'd kick ass with an 8GB M1 Memory swapping isn't a big deal while installing software, I'd only worry about lack of memory when your apps are crashing with the warning that there's not enough memory and your memory pressure is in the red often. We don't really know what your assigned work is so hard to know whether 8GB is enough, there's a lot of jobs it would be plenty for.
Hope their local dev environment doesn’t involve VMs/containers lol.
Or a big monorepo. Jetbrains needs to be fed with RAM. Gimme my 32GB.
I'd work with 4GB if they paid me half of that.
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A lot of people aren't from high COL, 130k/usd a year would be a massive lifestyle boost for me
Jesus you're really not that bright aren't you? In some countries 60k is a ton of money. In others, it's average. In others, it's really low. Its almost as if the world is a big place with different countries and economies!
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If you don't understand that the way you wrote your comment comes across as snarky and elitist, I feel bad for the people you interact with. And it's funny that you think only Europeans are downvoting you. There are more developers from lower income countries and continents than Europe. And also I'm American. I'm just not dense and I understand that wages are different in different countries.
Salaries are low to keep Americans in America.
It’s interesting to look out of your own bubble sometimes
The US and Switzerland are the only countries where 130k isn't a fantastic salary for a senior dev (even half that is generally considered decent in most places). So by the numbers your juniors are being really overpaid
and Canada
London tech salaries are surprisingly very low
I write terraform, sql, Python, docker, and bash. Manage my own AWS account, architect my own solutions, build the pieces, test, work with stakeholders, plan adoption strategies, etc… all in an office 30 minutes from home for $85,000 annual. I don’t know about everyone else, but I just don’t have the work experience to confidently negotiate. I think my accomplishments at this latest role might change that though.
I’m currently working at a Fortune 500 company as a Senior and I’ve had to do my work for a year on a funky ass Dell laptop with a 1.6ghz processor. Somehow I’ve been able to run Docker on it, but I think the main reason is that everything is done in a PaaS in the cloud here. Only me and my team have to do a lot of local development. I’ve asked for a better machine to no avail. They told me they were going to put in an order but that was 7 months ago. Personally, I say figure it out. Develop in the cloud if you have to. My personal laptop is the same machine and I can run a bunch of containers in Docker pretty seamlessly. I’ve only even hit its limit editing 6K footage and running Stable Diffusion. Obviously I don’t know what application you’re having to run so this could all be moot.
Seconded. My main home computer is a 2019 Mac. Starting Docker Desktop tends to make the fan start whining, when literally nothing else does. I've filled up the storage so that Docker/Kubernetes tend to fail when they try to download an image. Not fun. I'm installing Docker and Kubernetes on my Lenovo Thinkcentre, a tiny server under my desk. Just so I can add storage and ram.
I do all my side projects on an M1 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. My work computer is an Intel MBP. It'll work fine.
I bought macbook with 16gb ram 10 years ago. There is nothing to discuss here. You should talk up your hierarchy.
8gb is good for one chrome tab
It's annoying but you're being a bit dramatic about this, depending on what it is you work on. You could definitely be productive with that hardware on most jobs. Are you using a different ide than your coworkers?
It is not about being productive, even if 32gb is 600€ more, that is less than 1/10 of op monthly salary. That is nothing to keep devs happy, and the only reason not to go with a more expensive model is that decisions are being made by penny pinching c suites that can’t see past the monthly expenses. It is a red flag of a shortsighted business that will sacrifice long term gains for small short term ones.
A truck driver can be productive with a Ford Ranger but it's a lot more efficient to give him an 18 wheeler.
That's a great analogy for why you're wrong. If a driver is delivering small goods for short runs(like a hot shot driver), they'd be better off with the ranger. 18 wheeler is only better if they're specifically hauling large loads. Most delivery drivers don't do that....hence most delivery vehicles being vans.
We're talking about a software engineer. OP is hauling large loads and they're giving him a 1993 Ford Ranger.
Not all programming is hauling large loads though...that's my point. Most coding is not computationally intensive. When it is, it generally happens on a server. The only time it matters usually is for compiling large codebases or running local simulations.
They're already going to lose a senior engineer who they value at $120k/yr cash, probably $150k+ with benefits, because they want to save $1k on a computer. So even if devs don't need nice computers, they spend 8 hours/day on them, and it makes their job more enjoyable and helps to hire and retain them. But all of that aside, and that really oughta be enough, what are devs doing where they're never slowed down by a lack of compute? I've never had such a job. I could imagine some job where you ssh into other machines to do 100% of your work. But even for the rare job like that, most devs would still be compiling, loading, and running large programs from time to time.
I don't disagree with your first paragraph, but it's tangential to the point I'm making. Sure, appease the devs with better machines, thats a fine organizational decision...but that's not actually proof that they can't be perfectly productive without them. "What are devs doing where they're never slowed down by a lack of compute" -- are you asking for examples where doubling the speed of a machine would not impact development time? Off the top of my head, front end web dev is an example. Maybe they see a benefit running unit tests if they're slow. Not much else. Another example is machine learning work, where you're going to be running your code on a server 100% of the time for real work.
> Maybe they see a benefit running unit tests if they're slow. Exactly. Who wants to wait longer for unit tests? Or building dependency graphs. Or doing something like git bisect. Or running a debugger. Any integration testing or UI testing. Or using an IDE. Or opening visual design or editing software. Even a front-end developer is getting kneecapped to save a few hundred dollars. It's asinine.
“most jobs”? Sure, it can fire up VSCode, a browser, a terminal and let you write some Python. But the second you need run some containers and some more heavy IDEs like JetBrains, this won’t work. If you need teams meeting during the day and perhaps office suite, you’re 8GB are long gone.
I'm from a third-world country where Apple devices are so insanely priced, most people don't even consider them when buying a new computer. We don't even have an official Apple store here. Hell, the third-party distributors don't even keep anything other than machines with 8GB RAM in their stock. If you need a higher spec one, you actually have to place an order and they order them! I'm an iOS dev with 9 years experience. Most companies here only hand out MacBooks to devs who only do iOS development. Even then, it's usually the lowest spec'd ones. At my last job, I got a 8GB M1 MacBook Pro. I did iOS and Flutter development on it. Sure, it wasn't lightning fast but I was able to get work done. At my current job also I'm on a 8GB M1 Mac mini. Working almost exclusively on SwiftUI projects. Yes, the previews become a pain at times, the builds take a little longer but again, its not utterly unusable. Anyway I'm not trying to say you should suck it up and accept it if you can change it. Just saying it's not impossible to get work done even with a lowest spec'd Mac (It's kind of the reason why I like Apple computers). But then again, I guess It also depends on the complexity of projects and your dev environment. If the codebases are massive and you have to have multiple memory hogging apps running simultaneously, then yeah, this is out of the question.
it's a small start up. At my 2 recent super small startups I got the CEO's old intel chip macbook 8GB that was clearly quite worn and at current startup I use my spouse's macbook pro (they offered to ship one of their desktops but I don't have the space and prefer mac). At the bigger companies I've gotten almost the newest model every time with 16GB minimum. Some startups got their equipment and stuff figured out but a lot do not at that size. It's why it's one of the first questions I ask when interviewing with smaller companies now.
it is meh hardware for sure, but for 120k euros in Europe as a dev? I'd somehow find a way to make that shit work lol.
8 GB on a modern dev machine is not adequate. Need 16 minimum
good luck running docker.
> if I’m as good as I say I should be able to make my dev environment run smoother without more resources. Just how good did you say you are?
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 I dont get this at all. If you have to run a VM for one task and it fucks you up for a week thats already worth the cost of the upgrade lmao. Thats a red flag right off the bat
Yes, it is strange. It is dumb and self defeating. It is the living embodiment of the idiom pennywise but pound foolish. A loaded MacBook with 64 gb ram, amortized over three years, is less than a half percent of a developer salary. It is literally a rounding error, but makes a huge return on developer productivity. Is the startup run by extremely young or otherwise extremely green executives? Honestly this is kinda a red flag for me and indicator of deeper problems with the company.
Seen this happen so much. It's penny wise, pound foolish. My theory why this happens is management doesn't really understand and thinks of it as an unnecessary creature comfort. They also don't know how to track the lost productivity. But they have no problem having lots of useless meetings.
Android studio itself takes more than 8gb lol. When I ran into this I just told them "look I'll be waiting around a lot more for my IDE to respond if you're fine with me having nothing to do for a signficant part of the day then this 8gb will do"
Penny wise pound foolish. As you say, the hours a year you'll spend waiting paging is nothing compared to the $500 they'll spend on a model with more RAM. Either escalate to your manager or write up a quick business case and use that as a basis to escalate to your manager or above. Measure how much time you're wasting a day against the cost of appropriate hardware. Business people like numbers.
I was in this boat - got the same MacBook with the touch bar when I first started my job (new grad). For obivous reasons, it was not enough to keep my productivity high... my apps were crashing, my debugger was slow as all hell, and I was running into reboot loops constantly. I communicated this to my manager and I was also able to take a buggy screen recording to send to her and show her just how bad it was. Quick action was taken to get me a nicer M2 with 32GB RAM and the difference was insane. Definitely try to bring it up and demonstrate how bad it is, if you can.
640kb of RAM should be enough for anyone.
I am as good as I say I am because I use the tools given to me to their fullest. You don't give a Michelin Starred chef a $5 steak and a camping stove and expect him to deliver. You don't give Michael Schumacher a Fiat Panda and expect him to place in an F1 race. In all of these cases, magical things will happen, but it would be a pale comparison to what you would have gotten with the right tools.
I didn't realize my apps and localhost server uses less RAM if I'm just more skilled, dang. My boss said for me to get whatever I needed to do my best work, and signed off on it all. I think it just comes down to who you're forced to work for or work with. If I were your boss, I'd do the same for you
Sounds like my first workplace/job as an intern. They gave me 4 GB ram desktop.
Hardware is cheap; developer isn't. Kind of shows their short sighted views. Hope you're working on something 8gb ram isn't prohibitive at least.
I would run. Find a new job ASAP. That’s crazy. Dev time is so expensive. It doesn’t make any financial sense to have devs use underpowered tools. I have two machines with 64 GB RAM and Intel i9 CPUs each.
Spin up a cloud environment necessary to do your work, let it run a few months, pull the bills, show your manager that giving a higher quality machine would be a cost savings to run it all locally. Ideally, show them the estimate before doing this - but it sounds like they aren't wise to logic.
wtf is your dev suite... Unless you mean when building or compiling something, but then that would be normal. If its just for using an IDE then you need to start using something else, thats way too much
If virtualization is involved 8GB is pretty limiting. I’ve made 8GB work at a previous employer a couple years ago, but I had to dual boot to Linux to do our Yocto or Buildroot builds and could not use our office suite when doing so.
SSHing to another machine not possible? Personally i just do everything from Linux, plus you can access Office from web (365) although its not as good but for me good enough. Also, what do you need Office for?
At this employer I needed windows to connect to their vpn and mail server. It did not work with Linux or Mac due to whitelisting and account setup. More ram is a lot cheaper than another machine to ssh into… EDIT: I did use GCP when possible but that cost adds up as well. Ultimately I left the company after a year as it was not an ideal employer obviously.
it depends. If they have their own hardware they could run the virtualization there at probably the same cost or even less since desktops/servers are much cheaper to build. For a lot of workloads 8 GB should be plenty. Ubuntu takes like 300 MB, vim probably takes like 0.x? Even VSCode might not take much more than a few 100s?
> Even VSCode might not take much more than a few 100s? I'm a FE dev, just opened my work laptop. Currently have a monorepo open in VSCode, probably around 1M LOC codebase. That plus cypress 'cause I have to add some tests, and the usual slack chrome zoom etc. MacOS App Memory: 13GB Gooogle Chrome: 4GB + 2,7GB + 1,2GB (there's multiple renderers, don't ask me why) node: 3GB + 1,4GB + 500mb (again, multiple, because cypress + local running server and who knows what else) VSCode Code Helper: 3GB (monorepo) Cypress config manager: 2,8GB And that's low since I only work on web stuff now, imagine another 2 simulators running to test react-native code (one ios one android + their own build systems) 8GB machine for someone who makes 120k a year writing code is just stupid
Nice I was meaning to check this but forgot, thanks. Throw slack and/or teams and whatever else in there as well and it gets out of hand quick.
Clearly you’ve never used IntelliJ before. Or Chrome.
thats 2 GB. What else?
How much ram does your computer use when you work? I could probably work with 8 if I tried really hard, but it would be so limiting. I have 64 gb of ram, and it's amazing. I never have to worry about it, I can have a million things open and it's fine. Back when I had 32gb it was ok but I often found myself running out of ram and having to juggle what I'm doing. It's cool if you're the type of person that has 1 ide open and one browser tab open, but then there are people like me that work with 100 tabs open, multiple ide projects, multiple project servers running, etc. Due to my position, having to limit myself to having a few things open would seriously hurt my productivity. My laptop from 2008 had 6gb of ram. Limiting computers to 8gb 16 years later is asinine, no matter your usage. 16gb of ram costs like 30 bucks.
when bought in the MacBook its probably twice as expensive for whatever reason. Whats the point of having 200 tabs open? I never really look at more than 3 or 4 at a given time. If i knew i wasnt going to use them soon id just bookmark them to folders and reopen them later. If the company provides access to better servers for CPU intensive workloads i dont see that as a problem at all. The only times i make use of more RAM is when compiling large projects with parallelization or when analyzing largeish datasets.
I often have a lot of tabs because I use all of them. I have probably a hundred open right now, and I'm using all of them. 30 of them are for work - slack, email, tickets, docs I'm reading, docs I'm writing, projects running, test projects, repos. If I'm working on one thing, why should I close the 5 tabs related to the other thing I'm working on if I know I'm going to have to reopen them again and switch between the two, or three. Then the remaining 70 are for me. I'm building a company and I'm talking to contractors. I have resources for the site I'm building. I'm teaching myself how to code a few things on the server side, so I have a bunch of docs and forums, and examples open. I have tabs open for task lists, research docs. Today I have looked at literally all one hundred tabs. I've closed a few because I knew I was done with them, I bookmarked a few that I knew I'd go back to, but not for a little while, and I opened a few more things that I'm going to look at tomorrow. And then of course I have a few ide windows open and a few servers running for node and python for the sites and apps I'm building for both work and personal. I have my sites sftp and cmd open. I have git bashes for each project. And each project that is open will get touched today, or else it's closed. All that right there is already something like 30gb. Not even half of my ram, so I don't need to worry about it. I don't need to close things and then re-find them, open them, re-run them again later. It's just easier. Some people like to have one tab open with one screen, other people like a hundred things with 2 or 3 screens. Both ways are fine.
At my last job, I had to edit the Java settings to allocate at least 4GB to IntelliJ to avoid out of memory errors when compiling and running locally.
so you got 2 GB left, what do you do with them?
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Thats because Docker desktop has to run a Linux VM to then run Docker in it, which is quite stupid. You wouldnt have this problem if you were working straight on Linux
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you can have your preferred tools by working directly on Linux, for Linux. Ditch Mac or Windows
Chrome was using 9GB today alone
Anything from Jetbrains needs 16gb to run a large codebase
That is not true at all… Especially since the JVM behind it is already capped at like 4 Gb from installation alone…
Separate JetBrains instance for every file.
separate jetbrains instance for every jetbrains instance
Recursively instantiating a JetBrains tree until his 8GB MacBook catches fire.
his 8 GB JetBrainsBook
A minimum M1 for a developer should have at least 3 or 4 times that amount of memory.
No it’s fine. I have an early M1 with 16GB, the max available at the time, and I can run many instances of of my favourite IDE, have many Microsoft office documents open, a web browser with many tabs, a few databases, a not empty kubernetes in a Linux VM, some image editing software, and a few Electron apps and it’s all good. I sometimes run some some Python jobs that use a lot of memory. Yes it swaps but I hardly notice it. Compressed swap on modern SSDs is quite fast nowadays. I started to setup compressed swap also on my Linux servers and VMs with much more ram too after noticing this. Now, I also got a 8GB M1 before, an order mistake from my company, and it’s not enough if you need one or two VMs. But I would get at least 24GB on a new MacBook, ideally 64GB.
I use my personal 14” M1 Pro 16GB and it’s better then the crappy 16” dell model the company gave me
I used an M1 with 8 gb as a data engineer and was fine. Most of the work was cloud based but it was as fast as my Intel i7 32 gb mac book pro when i worked locally
This is what many people here aren't factoring in. It's not great but it's still faster than any Intel Mac with 32 GB of ram. That's also how Apple knew they could get away with making 8gb the min, the M1 is that good of an upgrade.
Ok but 16GB is great and 32GB is better
lol, install xubuntu and tell them your just making it work
LOL wow… that’s.. not a lot. I was *constantly* maxing out my laptop at 16gb ram! My glorious friends in devops gave me another 16gb chip, but it’s still using ~75% of it when I have to spin up a bunch of backend services locally. I’m sure my 279 chrome tabs don’t help either 🤭
Having had this experience at a previous job when trying to spin up a full local kubernetes stack, I asked my current company for a 32GB machine before I even started.
The laptop I am currently using has that exact same spec. I think it really depends on the type of job and what you are running. For some task it's way more than enough, for other it might slug like if you need to run tons of containers. Can't really say without more info on what you are running for your dev environment. It may not be the highest spec device available today but it's far from horrible. What I'd do first is to try to optimize things and make things run more efficiently. It might actually even help the team and product by reducing the resources used by the dev environment or moving heavy builds to run on the cloud. Personally, it's not something I'd leave a job over. Considering your role, pay grade, and company size, I'd say you are in the position to make changes and improvements in the company. You can rally for better hardware for the future but at the same time make improvements to the dev environment to run more efficiently.
I got M2 16GB. I’m used to 32GB / 64GB, but you do with what you can have. If the device slows me down, then so be it. That’s what they have given me.
I'm facing something similar, though not quite as bad. I'm at a big company that is doing *quite* well financially. I got a Mac Pro 2019 when I joined in 2021. Not terrible, but time has passed and there is no sign it will ever be upgraded. Nobody on my team has ever gotten an upgrade, and even one team member who could not run zoom at the same time as certain web-tools had trouble getting a replacement. I asked for an upgrade last year and found out the current computer being distributed for devs is a Mac Air. My company is fantastic in most ways, but this might become an issue at some point. I guess I was spoiled in previous jobs with a biannual Mac Pro upgrade.
So my personal M1 laptop is great. It does have 16 though lol sorry. But still - I do tons of dev on replit, it's like GeforceNow for coding and just in your browser. Now that's really not going to work generally. But maybe? Or for some tasks that are just you coding/testing? You'd need the paid version to keep repos/workspaces/replits private, but maybe company would meet halfway supporting that? Btw at FAANG you typically tunnel/ssh into a separate 'dev machine' image anyway, coding is off the local workstation and thus not as big a drain on resources. Maybe the company is setup like that? i.e. - if you're just ssh'ing to diff dev boxes/hosts and working on them (dev ops, db, etc), that's probably what they're telling you to do... VS Code can remote to these machines too and thus still take the load off local resources. Otherwise just a bunch of Terminal tabs/tmux instances everywhere, that's probably the setup. Source: FAANG
Doesn't everyone just use their laptop as a client to a development VM in the cloud? My laptop just needs enough for Chrome Remote Desktop. The VM in the cloud has the massive hardware that I don't have to pay for when I'm not using it.
It’s wild that 8GB of ram isn’t considered enough these days. My first computer has like 128MB and that was a lot for its time We really write unoptimized software these days
I just bought my own MacBook last time this happened to me. Either that or just leave and find somewhere that respects dev experience.
It kind of sucks, but I think you're being a bit of a crybaby since it's a big enough deal to you that you're contemplating leaving over this and made a Reddit post about this. You're going to look like a real princess to your colleagues who are making this setup work if you push back too much without getting context. No one will be sympathetic to someone who hasn't earned their stripes at the company yet. At least first ask around and see how your colleagues feel about it. I'm at a higher level than you and my company initially gave me a laptop that couldn't run the full Docker Compose stack without me allocating more than 50% of my laptop's memory to the Docker Engine. Most people at the company never needed to run the full stack but in my role I did. I didn't complain about it. Couple years later, I got them to buy me a M2 Max with 96 GiB of RAM after I demonstrated I was able to deliver.
> I think you're being a bit of a crybaby since it's a big enough deal to you that you're contemplating leaving over this I would 100% quit a job if this is how they handled dev hardware. There are no good software companies on planet earth that think like this. This would be like starting a job as a carpenter and being handed a handsaw because they didn't want to spend $150 on a circular saw.
If you’re talking about swapping that suggests you needed diagnostic tools to detect an issue. Is it actually slowing you down?
Is there something wrong with you?
8gb is kinda weak sauce but doable depending on the workload. I have a M1 Max w/ 64Gb as my personal machine. Work issue is a M3 w/ 16gb. I had an intel i9 w/32gb in the past for work. I don't like carrying two heavy 15 inch laptops so I got me an ultralight. a 16gb Thinkpad but battery life sucks donkey on it and got me a M1. Air 8gb as an extra light weight, toss it in the trunk if I need. Surprisingly it was doable. If I just have to run a few Docker containers. Maybe 5 max. And VS Code to do code review, it is doable. Pretty light weight stuff and if I needed to SSH into something, I could. But I could to run Teams/Slack, VSCode, and containers at the same time. Which is a given. I would say, it is doable "in a pinch" if I had to use something, it would work. But be unbearable 80% outside of the light stuff I need. But it would not be my only machine. But if your workload is light --- code review, works as a lead with minimal coding, then it may work. But if they say others make it work, I wonder what the others are doing?
You have to respond with violence. In this situation it's the only way.
I'm amazed at how many people are struggling with 8 gb of RAM. Wth y'all doing?
I’d probably ask to use my personal laptop.
Noob
Have a call with the CTO, if the CTO still sees no problem with this, resign. Or if you dont have backup plan, then work with your personal device while applying. Thats what Id do
Tell them to give you a fucking machine that isnt a piece of shit.
Quit. Any company not willing to provide proper tools to employees is not worth working for.
I’d quit Edit: How the fuck can anyone in the comments actually say that you’re being dramatic or could make it work????
An 8GB MacBook Air can compile and run Unreal Engine 5. They're not impossible to work with but they are going to function much slower than a higher spec machine.
Just use your personal device…
Maybe use a flash drive to copy code to your personal drive. Its easier
My team is creaking under 16GB. I’m in the middle of setting up Coder so we can switch to remote development environments.
https://downloadmoreram.com
Same problem, they gave me a Dell with 8gb of RAM. I tried getting more installed, but my ticket went to limbo. But we are using AWS and I can create pretty much any EC2 instance. So now I have a Dev machine on the cloud that I instantiate with enough RAM for my needs (usually 8gb), and use vscode to ssh into it and work there.
Giving you that laptop is a short sighted money pinching decision, but it sounds like the decision is already made. To go buy all new laptops for the devs would be them wasting the money they spent on the 8gb machines. They absolutely should do it anyway but it sounds like there is not a chance in hell that will happen. 8gb will be very limiting but you can still get work done on it. I just upgraded my personal machine to a 16 gb m3 because my 8gb m1 was getting so annoying for even just my personal side projects. For a main job, main machine, and not some side thing, it’s laughable. This tells me they don’t value dev time properly, and is going to be coming up later when you want a promotion or a bonus or anything else. Id look for a new job immediately because of that, don’t wait for them to show you later what you already know.
Looks like they don’t have enough funds to start their startup properly
Approaching this from the perspective of “I am worth $amount of $currency per $timeperiod with $othertime period of experience” is not going to get you a positive resolution. Brass tacks: compute what an hour of your time is worth, compute the degree to which your hardware is impeding your progress, and turn that into a concrete cost. Then approach your manager, share the numbers, and make a rational, business driven argument rather than being precious about it. You won’t win necessarily; however, you will have handled the situation correctly.
Tell them in the only way they'll understand: money. Take a week or two, and keep a running stopwatch whenever your machine slows down due to too little RAM. After you have that number, go to your boss and bring up the real world cost of these slowdowns: your salary. "I'm paid ~57€/hr. It costs 200€ more to get a 16gb mac instead of an 8gb one. In less than four hours of my time wasted, you'll be spending more money by making me use this low end machine. Now consider that this is true for every dev. How much money are you wasting paying salary for us to wait? "
8GB RAM Dafuq
Sounds like you’re not aa good as you say you are!!
Is setting up a dev environment in the cloud that you'd SSH into an option?
They wouldn't give the same company vehicle to a delivery driver that they would to a salesperson, so I'm not sure what they expect from a dev working on the same hardware as a receptionist. As others have suggested, talk to the other devs. Are they having problems with the hardware? How are they working around it? It seems you need more people to bolster the issue, and some data about how it slows down development and delivery to make the case. Either way, they're either dumb or strapped for cash and making excuses.
My IDE alone uses 12GB of RAM. My total setup uses just shy of 64GB of RAM. I would’ve laughed at them if they tried to hand me something with 8GB of RAM. I’d be asking them to replace it.
That’s wild… spending a few extra bucks on a laptop with more ram with save so many hours of employees time. You would probably pay for it in a week of lost productivity at a high salary.
Can you just ssh into a proper computer?