Management getting swaggy laptops and engineers having to work on the cheapest and shittiest windows laptops is a thing in every German company where the software isn't the core product(embedded, IoT, hardware, automotive, mechanical, chemical, finance etc.) because Macs are expensive and since beancounters are valued more than SW engineers they can make themselves look like heroes in front of management by showing them how much money they saved the company by leasing a fleet of cheap machines for everyone, regardless of their job, from the local HP/Dell/Lenovo dealer vs the productivity loss of their developers that they won't bother considering.

I only saw good machines in companies where only software was their business(mostly web shops) so management there knew the value of providing good laptops and monitors.

The irony is that as I move into management, I less and less see the value of me personally having a powerful laptop. My job is Jira, Github, and Zoom; why should I carry around a 16” MBP for all the power I don’t need?

Wait until you need to run Microsoft Teams. You’ll need to carry an entire supercomputer to run that pile of shit and even then it won’t be smooth.

Even Jira is not too far off these days unfortunately despite being a relatively simple tool (but they needed to justify hiring tons of JavaScript developers).

At least we can be safe in the knowledge that Teams will be the only bloated Electron app Microsoft make a core part of the Office suite.

There is no way most company issue laptops can run two programs that resource heavy at once, without Windows 10 randomly closing other applications or flashing a black screen at you.

Nothing can possibly be slower than a heavily customized Jira instance.

I opened up the api recently to discover that every story I edited had close to 100 custom fields on them, most duplicative (presumably) and hidden.

What angers me about Jira isn’t the slowness of the backend - that I can wait. It’s the slowness of the frontend that’s the problem, which is a combination of a JS-heavy front end as well as its hard dependency on the backend, where as basic HTML forms & page navigations typically leave the previous page interactive until the response from the backend arrives so you can still look at the existing page as well as allowing you to cancel a page load and still keep the currently loaded page.

Probably all the backend telemetry teams uses.

if you want teams to go through a proxy, they basically say "open all ports tcp and udp to microsoft.com + even more" I think it might be like 52.0.0.0/8 or something

I don't know, Zoom seems to like to hang out using an entire CPU when you're not even in a meeting.

Well, to run Slack...

Zoom is the new culprit. Occasionally it’ll demand so much from my computer that the 100W charger won’t be able to keep up, causing my battery to begin to discharge.

Are you running the from the browser and not the app?

My biggest Zoom gripe is being unable to control how much bandwidth it uses. 360p is fine for the others and I on the call when we’re not sharing screens.

If it weren’t for that, I could télé-work from the cabin a lot more... stupid Canadian mobile providers...

I’m running from the app in OSX. The browser version is somehow even worse.

I work in a worlwide (german) industry / automotive company. The group leader can decide what Notebook, PC or Workstation his team gets. We can choose between a normal office HP Notebook/PC or a pretty good version of a HP Z-Book or a fast Workstation. Also I think most external tech guys who came to our company, they usually have real good hardware. At least in my company now, the managment has just normal office notebooks or convertibles.

Not strictly true, but overall I'd say it is accurate. There are more and more companies in Germany that are becoming tech aware even though the tech is secondary and they realize there are productivity gains to be had from giving their tech employees proper tools.

Still, that's yet another version of the beancounters perspective.

Definitely not my observation (working in Germany in automotive). All of us are using one of the generic PC. To be honest, our PCs have been pretty reliable, suitable for the purpose. The service quality is also surprisingly adequate.

The only time I see MacBook are when we get the consultants visiting us. They are always decked out in the latest Apple gear.

Try running Solidworks on a 300€ laptop.

Switching everyone to laptops is the biggest productivity loss in engineering departments.

Engineer teams did switch to MacBooks in 2019. And managers slowly too, in 2020.

How did you guys solve it?

double boot and windows looking customized desktop ?