Re:If Your Laptop Is Open, You're Not Listening
by vidarh on Monday May 09, 2016 @06:37AM
(#11658747)
I used to work at Yahoo (a decade ago). At the time every hardware purchase went through a review committee in Sunnyvale. Even for e.g. Europe - I worked out of the European head office in London.
That committee included one of the founders (I can't for the life of me remember if it was Yang or Filo). I had to buy $4k worth of hardware once and they spent 20 minutes grilling me about load data etc. from the current server.
It just baffled me at the time that a multi-billion dollar company saw it as worthwhile for one of its founders to spend 20 minutes discussing a $4k purchase.
Not to mention the signal value about how little they trusted the judgement of their engineering team.
I concluded that it basically was about two things:
1) to keep said person away from more important decision, at the cost of annoying a lot of other people. 2) as an intentional barrier to make people think twice about asking for more. To #2 on one hand I appreciate fiscal responsibility, but at the same time I've seen too often how making people overly stingy often wastes huge amount of resources trying to engineer around something that could be solved for a tenth of the cost by throwing more hardware at it.
That committee included one of the founders (I can't for the life of me remember if it was Yang or Filo). I had to buy $4k worth of hardware once and they spent 20 minutes grilling me about load data etc. from the current server.
It just baffled me at the time that a multi-billion dollar company saw it as worthwhile for one of its founders to spend 20 minutes discussing a $4k purchase.
Not to mention the signal value about how little they trusted the judgement of their engineering team.
I concluded that it basically was about two things:
1) to keep said person away from more important decision, at the cost of annoying a lot of other people. 2) as an intentional barrier to make people think twice about asking for more. To #2 on one hand I appreciate fiscal responsibility, but at the same time I've seen too often how making people overly stingy often wastes huge amount of resources trying to engineer around something that could be solved for a tenth of the cost by throwing more hardware at it.