Hardware Is Cheap, Programmers Are Expensive

Sportsqs points out a story at Coding Horror which begins: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US. You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team."

Comments

Re:But who's going to fly it?

[tinkertim]

"10,000! We could almost buy our own ship for that!" "Yeah, but who's going to fly it kid? You?"

Typical Management Response:
"You bet I could!, I'm not such a bad programmer myself!"

Re:Timing is everything

[dexmachina]

And if that still doesn't appeal to you, Walmart sometimes has developers going as loss leaders during the Christmas season...you can pick one up today for a fraction of its wholesale value!

Re:Timing is everything

[ijakings]

Yeh but you have to appreciate where all this enormous amount of hardware, enormous amount of hardware goes. It doesnt just come on a truck you can dump things on, it has to come via a series of tubes. Oh... Wait.

Re:Frist?

[couchslug]

"Natalie Portman can't act for shit and she has the tits of an 11-year old girl. Grits are bland and best served to the inbred, down-syndrome-afflicted inhabitants of the Southern United States."

OK, OK, ya got me horny, hungry, and nostalgic for the folks back home, but what was your point?

This only works with LAMP/FOSS

[Alpha830RulZ]

If your performance problem is in an Oracle or SQL Server database, throwing more hardware at the problem probably has a license fee attached to it, and that can easily be measured in multiple developer salaries. This also causes people to scale using bigger boxes, rather than more boxes, and that gets you out of the range of commodity hardware and into the land of $$$$$.

Which is why I don't care to deliver on Oracle, but my employer hasn't figured out that Postgres and MySQL will work for a lot of problems, and is still fellating the Oracle and IBM reps.

Re:I agree.

[theaveng]

Engineers are billed at about $90 an hour. That includes wages, health benefits, rental for the cubicle space, and heating.

Re:Assuming of course hardware is the bottleneck

[ScrewMaster]

I remember being subject to a class called Data Structures & Algorithms ...

Yes, I believe Nicholas Wirth taught that one. Supposedly when you've added the Data Structures to the Algorithms, you get Programs or something.

Re:But first: Profile, Analyze, Understand

[frehe]

Of course, in my line of work the goal is to go from "a million years" to "realtime" so all the hardware in the world isn't really going to help much.

Here's a free pro-tip for you: Just find and use some really small years, and you should be able to solve your problem.

First Java Post?

[tomhudson]

When developers ask for a new monitor or dual monitors, let them have 'em but mandate that the monitors be in a vertical orientation [about.com]as opposed to the typical horizontal orientation. That way, they'll have to use the monitors for efficient viewing of code rather than watching movies all day long. It's such a simple idea that I'm surprised that more businesses and coders haven't caught on to it.

Who will be the first to post "ICodeInJavaWithClassesWithReallyReallyReallyLongNames.youIgnorantClod();" ?

Re:First Java Post?

[shutdown -p now]

std::i_code_in_cpp_with_crptc_cls_names::you_insns_clod();

Re:Another u.s. specific problem. cost of living

[0xdeadbeef]

extremism is bad at EVERYthing.

See? You used the shift key. That wasn't so hard, now, was it?

Re:Recalculate for the crisis

[0xdeadbeef]

I will send you $20 bucks if you post a photo of yourself holding a sign that says "A non-white immigrant paid me $20 to hold this sign."

Re:Timing is everything

[deraj123]

Did I use to work with you? I got to experience this first hand once - I left when we had gone from 3 servers to 84. (our factor of capacity increase was a bit better, the first server supported about 25, the 84th about 15...)

Re:programmers save lifetimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone evil (like me) may ponder the other side of that. If I can *put* another 5 seconds on the boot time then I can effectively kill 50 people and get away with it. But then I'm a bastard.

Re:Timing is everything

[Xest]

But if he's blind he might crash and not finish at all :(

Re:I agree.

[bwcbwc]

Uhh, you can't "throw hardware" at a hardware design. In the HW manufacturing case, you WANT to spend money on the upfront design to reduce the parts cost.

If your design forced to use 1% resistors instead of 2%, you'd better have been building a medical device or something else with tightly regulated specifications. Otherwise, when your boss says to use 2% or 5%, tell him to loosen the specs. Otherwise you're just over-engineering.