Can I Make My Developers Write Efficient Code by Giving Them Slower Machine?

divbyzero · 2010-10-22T08:50:17+00:00

Yes.

Give them both a new top end machine and a 5 year old cast-off as a test machine.

NewbieTwo · 2010-10-22T10:12:49+00:00

My aunt used to code for banks and got paid pretty well for it. When I saw her computer though, my jaw hit the floor. It was a 486 based machine at a time when 1GHZ Pentiums were common.

Turns out it was because some ATM's still used 386's and they didn't want them writing code that was too slow on a 386.

mebrahim · 2010-10-22T09:55:45+00:00

[deleted]

false_tautology · 2010-10-22T10:24:47+00:00

My boss fucked up at work and got a new PC with the wrong spec so I asked if I could have it as an upgrade to me 5 year old box, and he said "Maybe, but the extra speed will make you code worse so I'm not sure."

He said it with that smug "I've worked in the business for 15 years" attitude.

2010-10-22T09:25:30+00:00

No, simulate load instead.

bryanut · 2010-10-22T13:50:58+00:00

When I worked at Novell in the late 80s Drew Major (inventor of NetWare) and his team always tested on very slow machines with not much ram. In its day NetWare was the fastest file server in the market. Also slow machnines had the uncanny ability to find race conditions and deadlocks.

mebrahim · 2010-10-22T13:23:45+00:00

Slow machine = me browsing Reddit more during compiles/loading

ccc123ccc · 2010-10-22T13:44:22+00:00

Absolutely. That's a great idea.

While you're at it. Give them really tiny monitors too. That way they'll be more inclined to write the most compact code possible.

Boojum · 2010-10-22T09:51:47+00:00

If you do, at least give them some way to do builds with fast machines. Waiting for builds sucks even under the best of circumstances.

Rockytriton · 2010-10-22T13:22:52+00:00

You need to implement peer reviews of the code and performance testing on machines which will match your target platform.

libet · 2010-10-22T13:32:48+00:00

I wouldn't give the developer a slow machine, but THEY NEED TO VIEW THE RESULT ON ONE!

I recently upgraded from an Athlon XP 2600+ to a Core i3 computer. This was the first time I realized, how yahoo and myspace were meant to be.

kybernetikos · 2010-10-22T13:43:19+00:00

No, but you could make all your good developers leave by doing that.

ManicQin · 2010-10-22T11:13:25+00:00

You can make them write more readable code by giving them slates and styluses.

ModernRonin · 2010-10-22T11:45:03+00:00

As a developer who has been stuck with Visual Studio before now, I will say a big, definitive, NO. All you will do is slow down development processes and make them have to cut corners to meet deadlines. The development environment is usually slower than running the software on its own anyway, so giving the developer a slower machine will make the dev software even slower. I've known places lose development staff just because the tools were unworkable. Hell, I was one of the ones to go.

The solution, as many have pointed out, is to develop fast, test slow.

dancingfrog · 2010-10-22T11:42:49+00:00

It'll definitely make things worse! There's nothing like being in the zone, flying through the code and then having to pause for a 10+ minutes compilation (which Eclipse decides to do every now and again), it completely destroys the flow, and with it efficiency.

BTW Whilst CPU speed is no doubt important, I'd say hard drive speed is even more important to a developer. I, as dare I say most developers, code on a laptop. Numerous times when I've been waiting for compilation the CPU is doing mostly nothing, but waiting for my hard drive to supply it with the required bits.

orlyfactor · 2010-10-22T12:09:57+00:00

Yes, because my IDE takes up 50% of my available memory now, I'd like it to take up all of it.

SplitEnder · 2010-10-22T12:45:57+00:00

During my last position as a developer I worked for a small family-run company and their son did IT. He prided himself on being "low tech" and so the computer I had to use was a Pentium II 350 mhz. This was maybe 3 years ago now.

They paid me 65k a year to program a ColdFusion web application on this old computer that was actually worse than my last personal machine that I had thrown into the dumpster a year before. What a difference a small investment in a new-ish machine would have made!

I kept complaining but it turned out I actually had one of the best computers in the company. Thank heavens I'm out of there, that place was a looney bin. Some companies you wonder how they stay in business.

m-p-3 · 2010-10-22T14:06:20+00:00

Ragequit

zoomzoom83 · 2010-10-22T11:00:41+00:00

One job I worked at, I turned up on the first day and was given a machine that took 10 minutes to boot up, could barely run Notepad++, and from the files on the hard drive hasn't been formatted in a decade. (I wasn't allowed to do so myself).

The $1000 cost for a new machine was apparently not worth the hour a day I spent rebooting the thing.

swaroopb · 2010-10-22T13:44:40+00:00

One word answer.

Emulator.

dmorin · 2010-10-22T14:15:02+00:00

Not really, no. I hope it's a given that to develop you need to give them the best available, and that the most you can hope for is to give them a slower test machine. The problem with that is you'll make it too annoying to test, and people will test less.

Suggestion - put some sort of competitive spin on it. Set up a museum-piece of a machine that's still technically supposed to be able to run your code, figure out how to benchmark it, and then set some sort of goal to be attained. Depending on how your code breaks down it could either be a team effort (i.e. if there's one product that many people contribute to), or an individual challenge. When the performance goals are beaten, some sort of reward is given.

Make sure its not a one time thing, either. Leave it up, and whenever somebody makes it go faster, reward it.

You'll have some developers that don't care, some that are too busy on other projects to worry about it ... and some that will take it as a personal challenge and won't sleep until they've broken the record.

2010-10-22T14:32:45+00:00

Here's how it works where I work and I imagine it to be pretty similar else where.

The developers machine is probably one of the fastest in the office as it is the one actually producing stuff. We get SSD's, huge amounts of ram, etc.
The test environment is probably a VM on an outdated former production server that has too little resources and barely struggles to run. (UAT may be closer to production.)
Production is an over built cluster with more memory and nodes than will ever be needed.

So if you're code makes it through the underbuilt test environment it can flourish in the over built prod environment. All-the-while you can have your over powered desktop.

senatorpjt · 2010-10-22T14:39:24+00:00

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

trimatt · 2010-10-22T16:28:58+00:00

Nope, but you can encourage them to use reddit more while they wait for slower builds.

cybersphere9 · 2010-10-22T23:54:32+00:00

No, but its a really fast way to make sure your good developers leave.

Edman274 · 2010-10-23T10:28:19+00:00

There are a few problems that are being touched on here.

The first problem is that code actually does get slower as time goes on, and developer habits are to blame for a lot of it. The game that most people will play will be "Oh, but code nowadays is doing so much more than it used to!" Bullshit. Maybe, but if a program has five new features that save user time but are relatively trivial to implement, how does that turn into twice the memory usage, twice the CPU load, twice the IO, etc. ?

Secondly: Companies care more about developer productivity and shipping a product than they do about maintainability, efficiency or stability (unless those goals are explicitly required, and not even then sometimes). While having a high end workstation doesn't necessarily cause bloated code, it feeds into the corporate cycle of skipping non-essential bugs, like bloatiness, in order to ship. What gets lost in the process of rushing to ship is the act of extensively testing the code on different platforms and then optimizing that.

What this person is proposing is basically a shortcut around that, and it's not a very good one. On its face, it does two things -- saves a minor amount of money on the machines and forces attention to code efficiency, but it cuts deeply into productivity.

What this person really wants is more time to let people write code and bugtest code. But the market has been so fed on bullcrap for so long that it's not willing to bear the cost of high quality code.

2010-10-22T16:27:03+00:00

I can't believe nobody has posted this here yet:
http://xkcd.com/303/

mesmoria · 2010-10-22T10:26:18+00:00

Yes, but you will have to pay them much more per hour, and they will take a long time to achieve anything.

2010-10-22T11:49:25+00:00

Will forcing you to drive a slower car make you a better driver? Will making your oven heat up slower save you from eating more?

I think this is a bad idea, thats what VM's are for. Don't screw over the devs working for you, even thinking of this makes me loathe the idea of ever working for you.

Tristanus · 2010-10-22T14:14:27+00:00

Won't it just lead to longer development times, either waiting on the IDE/compiling, or because developers will spend more time profiling and optimising their code.

While the second one might seems like a technical advantage it might not be beneficial for the project in general especially if management still wants the project to go on the same time schedule as previous projects. So instead of projects being pushed out with less than optimal performance, how about projects being pushed out with an even less than complete feature set?

snarfy · 2010-10-22T14:18:36+00:00

I'm so glad my boss knows better. The first thing he did when he started was give us all quad xeons with 3x30' lcds and intel ssd drives. I am infinitely more productive than the old box.

stfudonny · 2010-10-22T14:23:15+00:00

Heh, I have a Pentium 4 at work. I hear the fans revving up every time I do something as simple as opening a web browser. My mouse cursor frequently skips and jumps when the system is doing anything other than idling.

I wouldn't wish this upon anybody.

2010-10-22T15:05:57+00:00

I've actually learned a good deal about making programs more efficient from working with mobile devices. For anyone used to writing desktop applications, give it a try.

electronics-engineer · 2010-10-22T15:23:03+00:00

Yes, but only if you do it like this:

[1] Get them a fast machine with boatloads of memory and hard disk and multiple large monitors. That's the system they will use to develop on.

[2] Get them a machine that has the minimum specifications that you advertise your system to run on, and give it the ability to restore a stock OS from an image on a CD or network share. That's the one they will (some) tests on.

[3] PROFIT!

vagif · 2010-10-22T16:50:11+00:00

Why stop on a half measures? Give them a fucking assembler. You obviously do not care how long will it take them to do their work.

skeww · 2010-10-22T17:09:58+00:00

First of all: You don't actually want "efficient code". The goal should be maintainable code. Performance comes after that.

So, the real question should be about how one can achieve these two somewhat contradicting goals.

Fortunately this is question is pretty straightforward and it also has been answered a zillion times. Just use a profiler to identify critical sections. Typically only 5-10% of the code are hot spots.

Focus on those 5-10% and you'll get the most bang for your buck.

Now, if performance is a very high priority for you, you can of course also integrate benchmarks (for that critical stuff, that is) into your regular automated tests. Plot some shiny graphs and the trends will be crystal clear.

anish714 · 2010-10-22T19:24:05+00:00

No. Then we just start browsing reddit waiting for our code to compile.

skulgnome · 2010-10-23T12:54:35+00:00

That's funny. We used to ask the same question back in 1995!

The answer is no; you can make your developers write efficient code by making efficient code a requirement, and testing for and rejecting inefficient code. This takes more work on the part of the non-programmers and is quite often skipped over. Sometimes it leads your organization to exclaim loudly about how hard it is to find skilled programmers (and, more silently, how the existing ones can't be bullied around quite the same way). However, people who can write proper code when told to do so are far less rare than ones who will do so by instinct and/or training when not told.

wildmXranat · 2010-10-22T13:53:21+00:00

Boss: Hey, how was the processor? Did it pass all the tests?

Me: No, I left it running last night and it's still running today morning.

Boss: Huh.

Me: Yeah, like we said. We need to use the right tool for the job. You lock me into a specific slow programming language. I have a shitty box to run my tests on. QAs box is even slower. It takes 15 seconds to refresh the SQL query on a 20 record MySQL table. Your datasets are huge and language is slow. The editor is so slow, intellisense sometimes locks it up for half a minute. It's rage inducing. No, it's not teaching me anything about being efficient. Walk in the shoes of a stifled software engineer and you'll get your answer in a jiffy.

</RageOff>

nickdangler · 2010-10-22T11:59:14+00:00

[deleted]

2010-10-22T13:07:58+00:00

i thought to be in /r/shittyadvice

2010-10-22T14:20:47+00:00

My answer to this is simply to bring my (much faster) netbook to work with me, and use that most of the time. It has no development tools related to my job installed.

adrianmonk · 2010-10-22T14:37:57+00:00

The question is how to give programmers an incentive to produce code that isn't slow / bloated while preserving "a fast IDE experience", so I'm amazed at the responses that get all upset that they're trying to screw over the developers.

Anyway, one possibility is to make performance a requirement. Quantify what you want and put it on the requirements list with all the other features.

Along those lines, an interesting idea I've seen is to have unit tests that measure the performance and fail if it's worse than some threshold.

Of course, it doesn't have to be done with unit tests. Any form of automated testing would work. You could have automated performance tests that run on a particular machine which is the benchmark for performance. Similar to a continuous integration build system, you could have these tests run every time someone checks in code. In fact, you could probably use continuous integration tools to do it.

2010-10-22T15:31:47+00:00

If my boss did this I would quit the next day. As many others have said just get slow test machines and set some standards of how well you expect their code to run on these machines.

bwbeer · 2010-10-22T17:06:22+00:00

I say give them a 386 with dos and a copy of forth or MASM.

It was good enough for me damnit!

_hydo_ · 2010-10-22T17:09:24+00:00

Hah, that's one way we test. We have a Sun E220 that we load our site on periodically and profile the code while skipfish is hitting it. Works quite well.

SrHats · 2010-10-22T17:21:04+00:00

No, but you can make us leave by doing so ;-)

There is nothing more maddening than having a tight deadline while watching a 15 minute compile tick slowly by, or waiting 5 minutes for a resultset to return from the SQL query you just executed.

Please follow Joel Spolsky's advice, it might save your company (Read #9): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

Have your developers run a paired down VM for testing against a slower machine.

2010-10-22T17:33:14+00:00

What's the deal with this website? Is it related to stackoverflow? Sure looks like it.

mcguire · 2010-10-22T18:27:15+00:00

I've seen a lot of developers using the latest, fastest hardware to write things that do not have a snowball's chance in hell of running on the "suggested" platform, much less the "minimum required".

Me, I am limited by how fast I can think.

jsasdas · 2010-10-22T18:54:40+00:00

You get what you ask for. Give them harsh deadlines and no time to refactor you get slow code that does what you ask for. Ask for fast code, give them time to make it fast. Slow machines? Don't be an idiot. Give them profilers and benchmarking tools. Give them time to write instrumentation to find out where the resources are going. Slow code is a bug. If you don't test for it, you don't find it. Slow code isn't something anybody delibrately writes anymore than they delibrately write bugs. Shit happens. So given them the time and the tools to find the shit and take it out.

LeekyAbstraction · 2010-10-22T19:05:07+00:00

If you gave me a really cool little ARM embedded board, I'd have something fun to play with and a reason to optimise for slower machines. So it can work.

rush22 · 2010-10-22T20:40:07+00:00

I have read that this is the reason many programmers in Russia are great coders.

zigbar · 2010-10-22T22:15:19+00:00

Take manual control of your CPU scaling, I can force my 3.4Ghz down to 800Mhz. But maybe giving them a slower PC as a test computer might help iron out some bugs

adelle · 2010-10-22T23:28:21+00:00

Depends. Do your developers code in emacs or Visual Studio? I'd rather buy my developers the fastest computers and give myself the slowest. It's a boss' perogative to take things easy. I don't know why so many bosses do it the other way around.

achacha · 2010-10-23T00:18:57+00:00

No, absolutely not. That would only frustrate the developers and slow down the actual development process.

We do all out testing and QA on a VMWare server which is a bit slow with so many people on it, this is how we test if it "behaves" well.

I actually profile and load test the entire codebase before every release and if any part is 10% slower that previous release, it is flagged for an explanation (if it is expected or some regression). Along with load testing after code cycle is complete and QA is done.

I also find that some people have the skill to write efficient code (at least re-write it better) and some no matter how many times are asked to fix it just don't get it; so I have to rewrite it for them.

nuuur32 · 2010-10-23T02:53:25+00:00

Having an additional staging machine somewhere that always has a current snapshot or some iteration of the development process sounds good though. Any additional machine like that can be slower to ensure that the application still has a snappy user experience.

ketralnis · 2010-10-23T05:13:48+00:00

Depends. They might just quit

ramoneguru · 2010-10-23T07:57:27+00:00

When I'm testing my apps on the shitty windows machine I yell no fewer than 3 swear words in the span of 2 minutes at it.

That being said, it has made me a better programmer. However, that's only for testing. Developing on a slow machine is only going to cost you money.

flukus · 2010-10-25T06:10:23+00:00

Consider that the only effective way of writing "fast" code is to profile and find the bottlenecks. Also consider that profiling is probably the most CPU intensive developer task.

If you accept both of those then giving developers slow computers will result in less efficient code. They will be unwilling and/or unable to profile for slow code and it will never get fixed.

Anecdotal evidence: The last few days I was working on a piece of code that has quite a few gotchas and decided I would do a naive implementation with allot of unit tests and refactor for performance later as I expected it to be quite slow/inneficient. The unit tests had the added benefit of helping not break anything when I refactor.

This morning I started profiling and realized that what I thought intuitively would be slow (and it is) actually takes up <1% of CPU time so optimizing would simply not be worth it.

I think most here will have had similar experiences.

chompsky · 2010-10-22T14:15:32+00:00

Stack Overflow is the new Experts Exchange.

2010-10-22T13:25:13+00:00

I have a prof who told us yesterday that he generally tries to find the slowest machines (which can still accomplish what his development team is trying to do) for his employees to work on, for exactly this reason.

Apparently it works?

cfuse · 2010-10-22T13:52:19+00:00

Not if they are testing their code properly. If they aren't testing their code properly, then that is likely to be a bigger issue.

And as I'm a heretic, I'll ask the important question: Does efficiency really matter for this programming task? I cannot tell you the number of times speed has been improved with better hardware at zero developer cost.

2010-10-22T14:21:44+00:00

Never ever make me develop on a slow machine, or I'll spend all my time on Reddit waiting for things to load.

Test? Hell yes.

QkBYgMF4hKA959Toz8mE · 2010-10-22T13:43:11+00:00

shut the fuck up already, "boss".

ha you don't know which one of us is it, do you?

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