Great Quote from Jeffrey Palermo

Posted by Jeremy Miller on January 13, 2006

Our laptops at work are a little shy on memory and with Visual Studio w/ReSharper/Sql Server/IIS going all the time the hard drive light basically never goes off.  On top of that, our laptop model has a reputation for hard drive failures.  We’ve tried to ask our IT guy for RAM upgrades and been told that the upgraded memory would be too expensive, end of story.  Jeffrey finally got fed up this morning and found a pretty reasonable price on 1 gig memory cards at Frye’s.  He explained it to me this morning as being like the “Tell, don’t ask” principle in code.  I’m just going to go buy the memory now, and tell them about it later when I turn in the expense report.


 


Well put.

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://volzsoftware.com Joshua Volz

    Seriously, how come people can’t do the math in the following word problem:

    I have 10 developers, each spends an extra 15-20 minutes per day waiting for something to happen on their computer. If I spend $160 on a gig of RAM, they spend 0 minutes waiting. Net time saved 200 minutes, or 3 hours 20 minutes. If I am paying the developer $80,000 per year, or about $40 per hour, I am recovering $140 worth of value per day. It would take me 11.5 days to recover my money in productivity. After that, all the productivity increases I get as an employer are free.

    Furthermore, I lower the chance of a hard drive failure that could cost one developer a whole day (replace the hard drive, reinstall everything). Cost of 1 developer day: $320 (and that’s if he only works 8 hours).

    If you take the above word problem and change the thing they need from RAM to “good version control software” I would expect that the recovery time is even less. How come those business types can’t do a return on investment calculation?

    Bravo for going out and getting some yourself. I am starting to think I need to just buy my own high end computer and monitors.

  • Ed Chapel

    In our shop, we all have Dell Inspiron 9300′s. We were able to find 1GB RAM for $160 per pair. With 2GB installed life is good. Then we turned off Virtual Memory in XP and ReSharper is MUCH faster. No more paging to disk.

  • RAE

    Rule #1: It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.