Got devs? Here's why they should have top-notch machines.
May 31, 2018 | 4 minutes read
What’s good enough?
I’ve seen some software shops that have decided that middle of the line computers are good enough. Reasonable thought I guess. I know some business owners see everything as some kind of investment. If I put this many dollars in, how many dollars will I get out? Also, what is the risk of me not getting a return? Well, buying the best laptops is a garuanteed return on investment of upwards of 100%. Sounds too good to be true? Well, honestly it does. and I may be a little impartial. But the math is solid.
Here’s a good example
Lets say you got your employees decent business latops like this Dell Latitude E5550.
Now, I have personal experience with this particular laptop. It has decent specs. It meets the requirements to run Visual Studio 2017, SQL Server and whatever other development software that programmers need. And it’s reasonably priced at $799. Seems like a good buy for a team of developers right?
This is burning money by the second!
That is, if the time of your guys equals dollars in any way.
Let’s do the math.
This article here states that about 3% of time is wasted when using slow machines. I didn’t see anything backing up this number so I wanted to find out myself how much time is wasted by asking around.
I found this out by asking users of this laptop. Here’s what I found. Below is the amount of time the average developer that has this laptop spends waiting on their computer to do certain tasks.
| Task | Time it takes (seconds) | Times it happens per day | Total time spent waiting (seconds) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boot the machine | 330 | 1 | 330 |
| Start SQL Server Management Studio | 120 | 2 | 240 |
| Start Visual Studio | 120 | 2 | 240 |
| Build a .Net web application | 60 | 15 | 900 |
| Total time spent waiting on their machines | 1,710 (28.5 minutes) |
This is extremely conservative. If I get into a good space and can focus on coding, I’d write code, build it and test it out at least 30 times within a day. Also, this doesn’t include a huge number of things developers do throughout the day, like opening Word documents or PDFs, sending emails, etc.
28 minutes a day doesn’t sound that bad, right?
No it doesn’t sound that bad I guess. Plus, how much can we reduce this by anyway?
According to this StackOverflow post, a user was able to decrease the amount of time required to build their C# applications from 10 minutes to about 84 seconds. That’s a reduction of 86%!
So what happens if we decrease the amount of time we spend above by 86%?
That 28 minutes wasted, turns into about 4 minutes! I know that everything will not be reduced by 86%. Some tasks might be more and some less.
Ok, so how is this a return on investment?
Let us say that your employees’ time is worth $50/hr. That’s conservative as well, but we’ll go with it for now.
In this scenario, there will be 20$/day per employee put back into the bank.
So if you have 10 programmers, then having top of the line machines will place 200$/day into the bank. Or $52,000 a year!
If you spend $5000 per laptop, you’ll get your money back within a year and after that it’s pure profit. And this doesn’t account for the increase in morale from having a machine that doesn’t lock up every minute. Plus, you’ll get praise from your employees when providing them tools that make their jobs easier. Something to think about.
Below I made a calculator, that way you can apply this to your business. How much money are you missing out on? Find out below.
Better Computer Calculator
You are missing out on per year!