I love the way the world works
 

Folks who are working on 5-7 year old laptops can't get new ones, but managers and above can all get $800 worth of video conference hardware that they'll use maybe twice a month.

5-7 year old laptops? What do those run, Windows 95? Do you have 256MB of RAM?

Good god...

The video conference hardware saves on travel and thus pays for itself quickly.

Showing how much time a new laptop would save and thus its money is a harder proposition. It's why I love working on code: I can show exactly how much my build times would go down with new hardware...

And the fact that 800 wouldn't really even buy you one business laptop, let alone however many spleen is saying are needed.

This is also vastly based on what one needs to use a PC for. Even now, netbooks are way more than people need, but yet those and more powerful machines are being bought all of the time. I'm pretty sure we run Windows 95/98 at best on most of the PCs at work. Only the one in the printing services department is really on the newer side and even that is running software that's somewhat dated.

Everyone else gets by with just conference calls. Why do they need to have viedo conferences.


On my team alone, there are 4 people who lose 20% productivity just because they have to work on shitty equipment.

With a video conference, I can tell if the person on the other end is flipping me the bird while we are talking--can't do that with conference call.

I usually skip every other PC upgrade cycle in our office (because of the annoyance of migrating my customizations to a new box), so I've had the machine I've got for coming up on 3 years now.

For 95% of my office, the horsepower I've got would still be plenty of machine, but after 3 years, it barely does what I need, and I'm enormously anal about keeping my machines in top form.

All I can say is that I'm glad I've got a boss who makes top of the line hardware a budget priority. The new Thinkpad they're building for me (right now, in fact) absolutely smokes my ancient Optiplex GX270, and I look forward to being able to do my job without having to shut down Dreamweaver and Photoshop every couple of hours to preserve memory.

I'd debate that - I bought a laptop for my home use a few months back for under $800* which is easily good enough for me to use for development purposes at a push (say if this laptop went down for some reason).

*Reasonable but not top of the line processor and 4Gb of RAM, thats enough for most peoples purposes I'd expect.

Maybe if you spent less time bitching at FOFC you might be in line for new video conferencing equipment.

This.

You can tell if the person is paying attention, reading their blackberry, engaged in the conversation, etc. Better than a conference call, fo sho.

Damn timestamp bug! This post from 7 years ago just got posted.

The key is to be able to prove it to management. What you really need here is the "this will increase productivity 20% for each of us, so if you buy four new computers you can fire one of the other 4 guys" cost-benefit study :D