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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

(blah blah blah we're hiring blah blah blah)

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.

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.

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'll take a rain-check though in case I do someday end up in Newton.

Ugh. I understand the principle of empowering developers, but some basic security would be nice...

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."

Disk IO is often poor too.

What's the limit tho?