How important is it to have good equipment in the tech field...

[LeMarchand]

It's interesting you say that actually because I always use my own mouse and keyboard.

 

Now you've said that, I did bring in a mouse here and bought one at the other place I have a permanent room, mainly because I had one I preferred spare/could buy one for a fiver as I like side buttons for forward/backward browsing.

[ADMaster]

I have a standard all in one i3 4GB, its what our business lab has for teaching office. I put an SSD in it when my HDD failed, and I've added a second monitor from a PC that failed previously. So nothing to special.

I try to work with similar spec to the end users so I know their experience. All the staff got laptops with i5 8GB and SSDs last year, but my AIO has a larger screen full keyboard etc. I can be more productive on it.

All my VM testing is done on the hyper-v server so I don't need ram for that. The most resource hungry app is PDQ Inventory / Deploy, this is where the SSD helps.

Most everything else is RDP / Web, RSAT, and other admin consoles.

Our digital art lab got new i5 8GB machines this year. They would be nice, but mine works fine can't really justify it at this time.

[just_david]

I think it depends what you do.

 

I'm running an i7 4770, 120gb HDD with a raid 0 1tb array for my vm's to live on. Always at least 2 and sometimes many more.

 

but whats probably more important for me is 3 decent screens.

I'd be happy with an i3 and 4gb of ram 120SSD, as long as I can have 3 screens 2 at least full HD.

 

I'd certainly think twice about a job that wouldn't provide that. AS has been said, if they aren't willing to provide the IT staff with decent kit, whats the rest of it going to be like.

[pcstru]

It's interesting you say that actually because I always use my own mouse and keyboard. Heck if I'm using some skanky hand-me-down. I mean, new mice and keyboards should be compulsory for new users because they're like a tenner each max.

I bought my own keyboard because I can't stand the cheap rubbish we throw at our users (but I completely understand why we can't buy everyone a nice keyboard and why it will make no difference to many).

 

In the main while we obviously have to have what we need to do our jobs, there are (or should be) some other considerations. I worry a little about technicians being out of touch with the user experience as well as setting precedents which people will inevitably get upset over - "well, I need X to do my job too!". For things like running VM's I'd rather throw the money at a server which could be used for such testing and which in an emergency might be useful to pick up workloads from failing hardware. I also think if I had jobs which were regularly "maxing out the capabilities of my machine", then running them on my machine would be a negative impact on my performance; I might be better off with a dedicated machine which could be slower but just get on with churning through the tasks while I get on with something productive. In software development I've rarely needed all the power of a machine (with a couple of notable exceptions mainly involving multi body physics simulations) and IMO faster machines can slow developers who become too lazy to actually look for errors with their eyes and minds and instead hit compile and run and get sucked into an iterative process where more and more time is simply spent looking at compiler progress.

 

That said, it is important to keep people 'happy' and sometimes that itself is a good enough reason to push the boat out a little further than might be though strictly (functionally) necessary.

[just_david]

I bought my own keyboard because I can't stand the cheap rubbish we throw at our users (but I completely understand why we can't buy everyone a nice keyboard and why it will make no difference to many).

 

In the main while we obviously have to have what we need to do our jobs, there are (or should be) some other considerations. I worry a little about technicians being out of touch with the user experience as well as setting precedents which people will inevitably get upset over - "well, I need X to do my job too!". For things like running VM's I'd rather throw the money at a server which could be used for such testing and which in an emergency might be useful to pick up workloads from failing hardware. I also think if I had jobs which were regularly "maxing out the capabilities of my machine", then running them on my machine would be a negative impact on my performance; I might be better off with a dedicated machine which could be slower but just get on with churning through the tasks while I get on with something productive. In software development I've rarely needed all the power of a machine (with a couple of notable exceptions mainly involving multi body physics simulations) and IMO faster machines can slow developers who become too lazy to actually look for errors with their eyes and minds and instead hit compile and run and get sucked into an iterative process where more and more time is simply spent looking at compiler progress.

 

That said, it is important to keep people 'happy' and sometimes that itself is a good enough reason to push the boat out a little further than might be though strictly (functionally) necessary.

 

I'm not sure how much of an end user experiance we get though.

We're running a completely different set of software on a different OS to the end users.

 

And a powerful PC can sometimes be far cheeper than a server. our i7's were end of line stock that cost £400 each.

I'm not sure how much of a server you could get for £1200, certainly not 12 cores and 48gb of ram.

Not to mention having to pay for an extra windows server licence.

 

as for "we need X to do the job too"

 

Well depending on your environment, but If they can prove it with a good business case isn't it our job to provide it?

(the same ofc applying to our having good PC's)

[Ephelyon]

I'm not sure how much of a server you could get for £1200, certainly not 12 cores and 48gb of ram.

 

That's where refurb comes in, especially if it's mostly used for testing. We've just picked up a DL580 G7 with 32 cores and 256GB RAM for £1.5K!

[pcstru]

as for "we need X to do the job too"

 

Well depending on your environment, but If they can prove it with a good business case isn't it our job to provide it?

(the same ofc applying to our having good PC's)

 

Define what a "good" business case looks like.

 

Fundamentally, a good business case may not create actual money and even if it can be shown to save money, often that saving will be some 0.n FTE - so it is unrealisable in practice. IMO it is our job to make things that are "must have" requirements possible, not necessarily to make them as 'efficient' as possible (partly because the concept of efficiency in the context is often hugely complicated and difficult to objectify).

[just_david]

Define what a "good" business case looks like.

 

Fundamentally, a good business case may not create actual money and even if it can be shown to save money, often that saving will be some 0.n FTE - so it is unrealisable in practice. IMO it is our job to make things that are "must have" requirements possible, not necessarily to make them as 'efficient' as possible (partly because the concept of efficiency in the context is often hugely complicated and difficult to objectify).

 

Well that would vary school to school and budget to budget really.

Given the budgets in schools I'd say "we can't do the job without it" is about it

 

But making admin especially efficient can save more money in the long run.

Hell as IT making people efficient as possible is our job (as far as money permits)

 

All the jobs in schools could be done without us, we're here to make them efficient.