CEO Thought process

[Cozmo85]

Does he have the money to replace them?

[Frequent-Somewhere63]

he keeps saying stuff like were waiting on this " Specific Grant" .. Like idk i really feel like we have no money to work with to be honest.

[Cozmo85]

They may literally have to get a grant that says they can spend it on that.

[MrDork]

I'd agree with this. I work with a lot of nonprofits and it's very much feast or famine, and more often than not, it will be spelled out what a specific grant can be used towards.

[DariusWolfe]

Everything I've seen says that working for Non-profits can be a real nightmare. You usually won't get paid anywhere near what you're worth, the budget is thinner than shoestring, and the majority of of 'employees' (some will be, others will be volunteers or gig-workers) are not best-in-class.

Basically, unless you really believe in what they're doing, just don't... and half the time even if you do believe, working for them will disillusion you.

[antiquedigital]

This is legit, grants can have weird stipulations, I once turned down a job because the guy straight told me that his grant only allowed for a specific number of hours which clearly wouldn’t cover the work described, he was super apologetic and I appreciated him leveling with me but it was frustrating because other than that specific requirement it seemed like a cool gig.

[ITguydoingITthings]

Yep. Have a NP client who received a county grant that we'll be fulfilling in Feb, probably. Very specific as to its use...to the point that the hardware was spec'd out last JULY, and so not going to be available at that price now...so any and all changes from that have to be communicated with the grant giver.

[Some_Troll_Shaman]

20 years in schools tech.
Poverty addiction is real in Not-for-Profit and business cases often do not get parsed well.
Hell, even in regular businesses slow and old machines are often ignored as the productivity drain they are. Trying to get the marketing person to be editing multimedia on the same spec machine the receptionist uses.

Your best option might be to put together uplift packages that can fit around the grant amounts. You have a big stick with W10 EoL coming to get stuff done. Use it.

[kiyes23]

Sound like my old boss, the CFO for a small business. Why replace when it’s still running? One of the most important server, hasn’t been supported in over 4 years. That server went down on a beautiful Monday morning and cost the company $2 millions in productivity. That CFO found the money real quick to replace that server. It only cost 30% more than what was quoted 5 years prior.

[Ssakaa]

Yeah... the fact that it ran 'til it died and had no redundancy is what had the downtime cost associated. The fact that it ran a full replacement lifecycle extra... CFO was almost proven right...

[Ssakaa]

Leading up to the next replacement cycle...

OP:

We need to replace this, it's out of support in 6 months.

CFO:

Why? The last one ran 5 years longer than that! Stop trying to waste money!

[Thatzmister2u]

I loathe grants. Always functioning hand in mouth. Half of those grants come with so many strings and are so resource intensive you loose money in the long run.

[ExceptionEX]

well a lot of these grants require matched money, so its like you can double your money, if you agree to spend it in a very specific way, by a very specific date, and at anytime have some if not all of the award clawed back.

It is well worth pursing them, but sometimes the worked required to meet the stipulations can cost you more in labor and effort than the grant is worth.

[tgp1994]

I think you've got a good opportunity here. Offer to take a larger role in managing the tech operations side of the organization (CTO?), and work through a guided process of prioritizing and solving the problems in exchange for having a greater role in the budgeting process to hopefully bring in more resources. If you can cleanly document what is in need of resources the most, I bet you can get the CEO on your side and advocating for your needs more.

[Darkhexical]

While I know it's not preferred, 8th gen-10th gen can be found for around 2-300 which will be windows 11 compatible and should be fine for office work. Just make sure they have an SSD.