Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.
> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,
You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.
Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
Not an expert here, but from what I heard, that would be a bargain for a good office chair. And having a good chair or not - you literally feel the difference.
(I'm not saying you're wrong. I think the real solution is that people should take better care of their physical selves. Certainly there are also people with particular conditions and do need the more ergonomic setup, but I expect that's a small percentage of the total.)
Honestly, they aren't any better than my ikea office chair I stole from my first house when I was a student (and that's been with me for the last 15 years). It has probably costed less than 100 €/$.
Ikea stuff is really underrated in this sense.
Just like with "policing", I'd only focus on uncovering and dealing with abusers after the fact, not on everyone — giving most people "benefits" that instead makes them feel valued.
So, if other engineers get their equipment for $6k (beefed-up laptop, 32" or 30" 5k widescreen screen, ergonomic chair, standing desk — in theory amortized over 3-10 years, but really, on the retention period which is usually <3 years in software), we are talking about an increase of $200 on that.
Maybe not peanuts, but the cost of administration to oversee spending and the cost to employees to provide proof and follow due process (in their hourly rate for time used) will quickly add up and usually negate any "savings" from stopping abuse altogether — since now everybody needs to shoulder the cost.
Any type of cap based on average means that those who needed something more special-cased (more powerful machine, more RAM vs CPU/storage, more expensive ergonomic setup due to their anatomy [eg. significantly taller than average]...) can't really get it anymore.
Obviously, having no cap and requiring manager approval is usually enough to get rid of almost all abuse, though it is sometimes important to be able to predict expenses throughout the year.
Alex St. John Microsoft Windows 95 era, created directX annnnd also built an alien spaceship.
I dimly recalled it as a friend in the games division telling me about some someone getting 5 and a 1 review scores in close succession.
Facts i could find (yes i asked an llm)
5.0 review: Moderately supported. St. John himself hosted a copy of his Jan 10, 1996 Microsoft performance review on his blog (the file listing still exists in archives). It reportedly shows a 5.0 rating, which in that era was the rare top-box mark. Fired a year later: Factual. In an open letter (published via GameSpot) he states he was escorted out of Microsoft on June 24, 1997, about 18 months after the 5.0 review. Judgment Day II alien spaceship party: Well documented as a plan. St. John’s own account (quoted in Neowin, Gizmodo, and others) describes an H.R. Giger–designed alien-ship interior in an Alameda air hangar, complete with X-Files cast involvement and a Gates “head reveal” gag. Sunk cost before cancellation: Supported. St. John says the shutdown came “a couple of weeks” before the 1996 event date, after ~$4.3M had already been spent/committed (≈$1.2M MS budget + ≈$1.1M sponsors + additional sunk costs). Independent summaries repeat this figure (“in excess of $4 million”).
So: 5.0 review — moderate evidence Fired 1997 — factual Alien spaceship build planned — factual ≈$4M sunk costs — supported by St. John’s own retrospective and secondary reporting
Nor how either translates to being a bad hire.
But also, when I tell one of my reports to spec and order himself a PC, there should be several controls in place.
Firstly, I should give clear enough instructions that they know whether they should be spending around $600, $1500, or $6000.
Second, although my reports can freely spend ~$100 no questions asked, expenses in the $1000+ region should require my approval.
Thirdly, there is monitoring of where money is going; spending where the paperwork isn't in order gets flagged and checked. If someone with access to the company amazon account gets an above-ground pool shipped to their home, you can bet there will be questions to be answered.
It’s like your friend group and time choosing a place to eat. It’s not your friends, it’s the law of averages.
I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?
I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.
I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.
Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.
You can steal $2000 by lying about a stolen laptop or lying about working late. The latter method just takes a few months.
Well, it was stolen. The only lie is by whom.
Negotiate for better conditions. If agreement cannot be reached, find another job.
none of it is good lol
gp was talking about salaried employees which is legally exempt from overtime pay. There is no rigid 40-hour ceiling for salary pay.
Salary compensation is typical for white-collar employees such as analysts in investment banking and private equity, associates at law firms, developers at tech startups, etc.
Yeah, it's hard to convey to people who've never been responsible for setting (or proposing) policy that it's not a game of optimizing the average result, but of minimizing the worst-case result.
You and I and most people are not out to arbitrage the company's resources but you and I and most people are also not the reason policy exists.
It was depressing to run into that reality myself as policy controls really do interfere sometimes in allowing people to access benefits the organization wants them to have, but the alternative is that the entire budget for perks ends up in the hands of a very few people until the benefit goes away completely.
If someone's unstable motorized desk tips over and injures someone at the office, it's a big problem for the company.
A cheap desk might have more electrical problems. Potential fire risk.
Facilities has to manage furniture. If furniture is a random collection of different cheap desks people bought over the years they can't plan space without measuring them all. If something breaks they have to learn how to repair each unique desk.
Buying the cheapest motorized desk risks more time lost to fixing or replacing it. Saving a couple hundred dollars but then having the engineer lose part of a day to moving to a new desk and running new cables every 6 months while having facilities deal with disposal and installation of a new desk is not a good trade.
1. My brothers (I have a number of them) mostly work in construction somehow. It feels most of them drive a VW Transporter, a large pickup or something, each carrying at least $30 000 in equipment.
Seeing people I work with get laptops that use multiple minutes to connect to a postgres database that I connect to in seconds feels really stupid. (I'm old enough that I get what I need, they usually rather pay for a decent laptop rather than start a hiring process.)
2. My previous employer did something really smart:
They used to have a policy that you got a basic laptop and an inexpensive phone, but you could ask for more if you needed. Which of course meant some people got nothing and some people got custom keyboards and what not.
That was replaced with a $1000 budget on your first day an $800 every year that was meant to cover phones and everything you needed. You could alsp borrow from next year. So if someone felt they needed the newest iPhone or Samsung? Fine, save up one year(or borrow from next year) and you have it.
Others like me who don't care that much about phones could get a reasonably priced one + a gpod monitor for my upstairs office at home + some more gear.
And now the rules are the same for everyone so even I get (I feel I'm hopeless when it comes to arguing my case with IT, but now it was a simple: do you have money for it? yes/no)
peanuts compared to their 500k TC
I do think a lot of this comment section is assuming $500K TC employees at employers with infinite cash to spend, though.
Two, several tens of thousands are in the 5%-10% range. Hardly "peanuts". But I suppose you'll be happy to hear "no raise for you, that's just peanuts compared to your TC", right?
Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies.
It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work.
Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.
A better option is for leadership to enforce culture by reinforcing expectations and removing offending employees if need be to make sure that the culture remains intact. This is a time sync, without a doubt. For leadership to take this on it has to believe that the unmeasurable benefit of a good company culture outweighs the drag on leadership's efficiency.
Company culture is will always be actively eroded in any company and part of the job of leadership is to enforce culture so that it can be a defining factor in the company's success for as long as possible.
If an employee or team is not putting in the effort desired, that's a separate issue and there are other administrative processes for dealing with that.
Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees without paying for it.
If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone.
Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their meals, that’s expense fraud.
These things are really not gray area. It seems more obvious when we talk about sales people abusing budgets, but there’s a blind spot when we start talking about engineers doing it.
This isn’t about fraud anymore. It’s about how suspiciously managers want to view their employees. That’s a separate issue (but not one directed at employees).
This is why I call it the soft fraud mentality: When people see some fraudulent spending and decide that it’s fine because they don’t think the policy is important.
Managers didn’t care. It didn’t come out of their budget.
It was the executives who couldn’t ignore all of the people hanging out in the common areas waiting for food to show up and then leaving with it all together, all at once. Then nothing changed after the emails reminding them of the purpose of the policy.
When you look at the large line item cost of daily food delivery and then notice it’s not being used as intended, it gets cut.
Essentially, you pay a lot for fancy design.
Plus, not to mention the return on investment you get from retaining the talent and the value they add to your product and organization.
If you walk into a mechanic shop, just the Snap On primary tool kit is like 50k.
It always amazes me that companies go cheap on basic tools for their employees, yet waste millions in pointless endeavors.
Anyway, your choices of what to do about idiocy like this are pretty limited.
You're underestimating the scope of time lost by losing a few percent in productivity per employee across hundreds of thousands of employees.
You want speed limits not speed bumps. And they should be pretty high limits...
After I saw the announcement, I immediately knew I needed to try out our workflows on the new architecture. There was just no way that we wouldn't have x86_64 as an implicit dependency all throughout our stack. I raised the issue with my manager and the corporate IT team. They acknowledged the concern but claimed they had enough of a stockpile of new Intel machines that there was no urgency and engineers wouldn't start to see the Apple Silicon machines for at least another 6-12 months.
Eventually I do get allocated a machine for testing. I start working through all the breakages but there's a lot going on at the time and it's not my biggest priority. After all, corporate IT said these wouldn't be allocated to engineers for several more months, right? Less than a week later, my team gets a ticket from a new-starter who has just joined and was allocated an M1 and of course nothing works. Turns out we grew a bit faster than anticipated and that stockpile didn't last as long as planned.
It took a few months before we were able to fix most of the issues. In that time we ended up having to scavenge under-specced machines form people in non-technical roles. The amount of completely avoidable productivity wasted from people swapping machines would have easily reached into the person-years. And of course myself and my team took the blame for not preparing ahead of time.
Budgets and expenditure are visible and easy to measure. Productivity losses due to poor budgetry decisions, however, are invisible and extremely difficult to measure.
> And of course myself and my team took the blame for not preparing ahead of time.
If your initial request was not logged and then able to be retrieved by yourself in defence, then I would say something is very wrong at your company.
That seems unreasonably short. My work computer is 10 years old (which is admittedly the other extreme, and far past the lifecycle policy, but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it).
It depends what you're working on. My work laptop is 5 years old, and it takes ~4 minutes to do a clean compile of a codebase I work on regularly. The laptop I had before that (which would now be around 10 years old) would take ~40 minutes to compile to the same codebase. It would be completely untenable for me to do the job I do with that laptop (and indeed I only started working in the area I do once I got this one).
For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.
XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.
Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.
I am 100x more expensive than the laptop. Anything the laptop can do instead of me is something the laptop should be doing instead of me.
> But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand
That abuse easily goes into the tens of thousands of dollars, even several hundred thousand, even at a relatively small shop. I just took a quick look at Apple's store, and wow! The most expensive 14" MacBook Pro I could configure (minus extra software) tops out at a little over $7,000! The cheapest is at $1,600, and a more reasonably-specced, mid-range machine (that is probably perfectly sufficient for dev work), can be had for $2,600.
Let's even round that up to $3,000. That's $4,000 less than the high end. Even just one crazy-specced laptop purchase would max out your "capped out at a few thousand" figure.
And we're maybe not even talking about abuse all the time. An employee might fully earnestly believe that they will be significantly more productive with a spec list that costs $4,000, when in reality that $3,000 will be more or less identical for them.
Multiply these individual choices out to a 20 or 40 or 60 person team, and that's real money, especially for a small startup. And we haven't even started talking about monitors and fancy ergonomic chairs and stuff. 60 people spending on average $2,000 each more than they truly need to spend will cost $120k. (And I've worked at a place that didn't eliminate their "buy whatever you think you'll need" policies until they had more than 150 employees!)
Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers.
Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need.
Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.
I read Google is now issuing Chromebooks instead of proper computers to non-engineers, which has got to be corrosive to productivity and morale.
"AI" (Plus) Chromebooks?
They eventually became so cheap they blanket paused refreshing developer laptops...
Proper ergo is a cost concious move. It helps keep your employees able to work which saves on hiring and training. It reduces medical expenses, which affects the bottom line because large companies are usually self-insured; they pay a medical insurance company only to administer the plan, not for insurance --- claims are paid from company money.
All this at my company would be a call or chat to the travel agent (which, sure, kind of a pain, but they also paid for dedicated agents so wait time was generally good).
I have a pretty high end MacBook Pro, and that pales in comparison to the compute I have access to.
Apple have long thought that 8Gb ram is good enough for anything, and will continue to for some time now.
Don’t worry, they’ll tell you
So people started slacking off, because "you have to love your employees"?
The outliers will likely be two kinds:
1) People with poor judgement or just an outright fraudulent or entitled attitude. These people should be watched for performance issues and managed out as needed. And their hardware reclaimed.
2) People that genuinely make use of high end hardware, and likely have a paper trail of trying to use lower-end hardware and showing that it is inefficient.
This doesn't stop the people that overspend slightly so that they are not outliers, but those people are probably not doing substantial damage.
We managed to just estimate the lost time and management (in a small startup) was happy to give the most affected developers (about 1/3) 48GB or 64GB MacBooks instead of the default 16GB.
At $100/hr minimum (assuming lost work doesn't block anyone else) it doesn't take long for the upgrades to pay off. The most affected devs were waiting an hour a day sometimes.
This applies to CI/CD pipelines too; it's almost always worth increasing worker CPU/RAM while the reduction in time is scaling anywhere close to linearly, especially because most workers are charged by the minute anyway.
I think you wanted to say "especially". You're exchanging clearly measurable amounts of money for something extremely nebulous like "developer productivity". As long as the person responsible for spend has a clear line of view on what devs report, buying hardware is (relatively) easy to justify.
Once the hardware comes out of a completely different cost center - a 1% savings for that cost center is promotion-worthy, and you'll never be able to measure a 1% productivity drop in devs. It'll look like free money.
P.S. you can buy a satellite monitor often for $10 from the thrift store. The one I bought was $10.
I don't buy used keyboards because they are dirty and impossible to clean.
Why is that abuse? Having many open browser tabs is perfectly legitimate.
Arguably they should switch from Chrome to Safari / lobby Google to care about client-side resource use, but getting as much RAM as possible also seems fine.
I have a whisper transcription module running at all times on my Mac. Often, I'll have a local telemetry service (langfuse) to monitor the 100s of LLM calls being made by all these models. With AI development it isnt uncommon to have multiple background agents hogging compute. I want each of them to be able to independently build + host and test their changes. The compute load apps up quickly. And I would never push agent code to a cloud env (not even a preview env) because I don't trust them like that and neither should you.
Anything below an M4 pro 64GB would be too weak for my workflow. On that point, Mac's unified VRAM is the right approach in 2025. I used windows/wsl devices for my entire life, but their time is up.
This workflow is the first time I have needed multiple screens. Pre-agentic coding, I was happy to work on a 14 inch single screen machine with standard thinkpad x1 specs. But, the world has changed.
AMD's Strix Halo can have up to 128GB of unified RAM, I think. The bandwidth is less than half the Mac one, but it's probably going to accelerate.
Windows doesn't inherently care about this part of the hardware architecture.
Equality doesn't have to mean uniformity.
Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things.
So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.
I've been on teams where corporate hardware is all max spec, 4-5 years ahead of common user hardware, provided phones are all flagships replaced every two years. The product works great for corporate users, but not for users with earthly budgets. And they wonder how competitors swallow market in low income countries.
The developer integration tests don’t need to run on a low spec machine. That is not needed.
At one place I had a $25 no question spending limit, but sank a few months trying to buy a $5k piece of test equipment because somebody thought maybe some other tool could be repurposed to work, or we used to have one of those but it's so old the bandwidth isn't useful now, or this project is really for some other cost center and I don't work for that cost center.
Turns out I get paid the same either way.
Where did this idea about spiting your fellow worker come from?
Limiting the number and size of monitors. Putting speedbumps (like assessments or doctor's notes) on ergo accessories. Requiring special approval for powerful hardware. Requiring special approval for travel, and setting hotel and airfare caps that haven't been adjusted for inflation.
To be fair, I know plenty of people that would order the highest spec MacBook just to do web development and open 500 chrome tabs. There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs, which is just a small fraction of one year's salary for a developer.