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Comment by kassner | Hacker News Reader

Something that wasn’t really touched in other comments is that you shouldn’t be in the business of doing charitable work for companies.

If the company provided you hardware that is subpar, you shouldn’t spend your own money (wrt to owning/depreciating your own hardware) for the company’s benefit.

Does that slow you down? You have to ask IT every time you need elevated privileges? Well, it is the company’s policy, you shouldn’t rob them the opportunity to feel the consequences of their own decisions.

A decent manager would understand how those internal processes are slowing you down, and a bad manager, well, they’ll find other ways to screw you if that’s what they want.

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> A decent manager would understand how those internal processes are slowing you down, and a bad manager, well, they’ll find other ways to screw you if that’s what they want.

You're putting a lot of faith in them having a decent manager.

Your next job is contingent on being able to deliver at your current job.

The reality is that you need to do what you need to do to get work done.

> You're putting a lot of faith in them having a decent manager.

If you have a bad manager, using your own hardware to deliver things faster maybe will make them like you. If it doesn’t, then it wouldn’t matter in the first place if you used your own hardware or not. They’ll find a reason to sack you.

Remember that hardware is extremely cheap compared to western salaries, relatively speaking. A beefy machine costs 1-3 weeks of the employee’s salary, yet it holds current for 3-5 years, and even if you are rotating employees often, it’s perfectly fine to hand down used ones. It is mostly a choice.

> Your next job is contingent on being able to deliver at your current job

The sad reality is your next job is only dependent of being able to pass interview rounds, and increasingly less about your previous work.

> The sad reality is your next job is only dependent of being able to pass interview rounds, and increasingly less about your previous work.

Could you explain this? I don't think that's what I'm seeing.

Can you find positions for experienced developers that does not involve some sort of coding step provided by the company? Take home projects, live coding, coding-specific questions, etc?

I’ve done over 40 interviews in the last 12 months, only one of them were even willing to make that step either optional or replace with something else that would better demonstrate my skills.

Every company treats me like a fraud until I pass their stinky coding challenge.

Ah right, I just read it wrong I suppose

"If the company provided you hardware that is subpar, you shouldn’t spend your own money".

Hard disagree. I've always supplemented or augmented my tools for work. I do this because my value for efficacy and comfort exceeds that of most of my collegues and employers. I went with SDDs, multiple large high qiality monitors, decent switches keyboards, 'gaming' mice, Safari subscription (back when books were still a thing) even better IDE's long before a lott of these became popular and prices commoditized.

If tools are holding you back, that might prompt you to look for a different employer, but why waste your own time just to 'retaliate' with holding back?

Holding back is retaliation against employers who don't want to invest into maximum employee efficiency.

But you make a good point about that also hurting yourself. Sub-par tools hurt.

I'd agree with you to invest in tools you use to work, but not to give the return of investment to the company. Instead one should work fewer hours if those hours are more productive.

I’d do that if that benefitted me. What do I get if I deliver the project earlier? The 2 weeks that I delivered it earlier because I already had root in my machine vs waiting for IT, do I get to take those as vacation, or I’ll just be assigned a new project?

If you are investing in increasing your output, only do so if you are going to reap some benefits too.

To me the driver is not increasing output. It is a mental satisfaction of spending my working time with tools I enjoy using rather than spending totally avoidable mental energy and frustration on coping with already solved limitations.

Alternative take, if i can do more work in less time, and company outputs are low due to shit infra, then i can Convert my assets into free time. I see that as a win.

That only holds true if you are able to use that free time. If you deliver things faster and just get assigned a new project sooner, you paid your employer to do work.

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