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Interesting story, and interesting rendition (that you linked to).
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Playing off the below post and my peeve of folks saying "invest" for stuff way too much to justify an expense that keeps them broke...
How many of y'all get just as excited to buy a new stock or commodity when it's on sale and cheap? Or running your business (during the good times  )? Or when learning something new that you know will change your life for the better? Or just from waking up to have another day to be awesome? Or getting your flirt on with your special someone?
I know for me, I get much less excited about PCs these days and get much more excited by stuff that actually makes money rather than lose it. Or it's more exciting seeing someone you helped train do something awesome. The excitement for a new PC wears off in a day.
Side note, silver is at $32ish an ounce again.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: peeve of folks saying "invest"
Ah, perhaps we've struck upon another topic upon which we agree, rare as that seems. 
Many people use the term "invest" when they actually mean "spend", perhaps in hopes of making it seem like a better expense than it actually is.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Ah, perhaps we've struck upon another topic upon which we agree, rare as that seems.
Woo hoo. 
PIEBALDconsult wrote: Many people use the term "invest" when they actually mean "spend", perhaps in hopes of making it seem like a better expense than it actually is.
Tru dat, buddy. I'm gonna go invest in Taco Bell now. 
Jeremy Falcon
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And many use the term investing when what they're doing is speculating. Speculating can be fun, but a nest egg should be invested.
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As much as I might want to do the investment thing, I simply can't, the subject matter bores me to tears.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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jeron1 wrote: I simply can't, the subject matter bores me to tears.
I totally understand that. The good news is, you don't have to care. I mean, you won't get like a bazillion percent returns, but you can just pay someone to manage a portfolio for you or just dump a few bucks into the S&P 500 every paycheck and never look at it until you retire. It mean it'll take a few decades, but you'll have a nice nest egg without ever having to look at it.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: you can just pay someone to manage a portfolio for you
That's me. The amount of time you have to invest (see what I did there?) to be good at it is staggering, and ain't nobody got time fo' dat. Well, I don't, or at the very least, I don't get excited enough about this to motivate me to do it to an extent I'd be confident I wouldn't ruin myself.
So my bank does it for me, for a percentage of my total investments. When I just look at the numbers, I'm paying them quite a bit of money each year, but they're still making me more than they cost. The numbers do grow, so I'm happy to let them take care of that aspect of my life.
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dandy72 wrote: That's me. The amount of time you have to invest (see what I did there?) to be good at it is staggering, and ain't nobody got time fo' dat. Well, I don't, or at the very least, I don't get excited enough about this to motivate me to do it to an extent I'd be confident I wouldn't ruin myself.
Amen brother. That's actually very smart. Most people lose money in the markets when they do it themselves. So, if you're not willing to put in the time because it bores you, it's so much smarter to pay the fee to let someone else do it for you.
dandy72 wrote: The numbers do grow, so I'm happy to let them take care of that aspect of my life.
That's smart man, glad to hear it.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: o, if you're not willing to put in the time because it bores you,
Well maybe "bore" is too strong a word. I think I'd be watching things like a hawk, to the point where it'd disrupt other activities...like work. I can't do that.
So the way I see it, my bank's fees buy me peace of mind.
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Several decades ago, to placate my folks, I gave some money to their investment manager, not sure if it's up to anything at this point. Talking to them is torturous, so I don't. Fact is I wouldn't trust anyone (myself included), really wish I did though.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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jeron1 wrote: Talking to them is torturous, so I don't.
Assuming you mean the money mangers and not your parents...
Gotta agree with you there man. I've literally had arguments with ignorant stubborn people over crypto for instance. They'll read a sales pitch but refuse to read a book. IMO only an idiot would argue with someone doing better than them (as far as money goes), but they're out there...
Unfortunately, this industry attracts the egotistical and uneducated alike. Money is the one thing we all need and the vast majority of pees don't have two brains cells to rub together. Personally, I've gotten pissed at instructors even when they lied to the class (to rob them of their money). And got depressed for a while over all of the level of BS in it.
Soooooooooooo... totally understand. Just you know, don't let their lack of education and ego harm your future. Ya know.
jeron1 wrote: Fact is I wouldn't trust anyone (myself included), really wish I did though.
There are different levels of what's right and wrong. Some people will say diversify and some will say don't for instance. Diversification is great if you don't know what you're doing... which is most people. If you're a master at whatever it is, it'll never make you as much. But, if you don't know what you're doing, you'll lose it all if you don't diversify.
Which is a long way of saying, you don't have to trust yourself. Just toss some money into an index fund (that you're ok with losing) and let the inherent diversification in it soften out the highs and lows for ya. Just know that doing this will take a while. People going this route think an 8% return in a year is good. Better than your bank at least and will only work if inflation stays at 2% (but that's a whole different story). But, it's still your best bet if none of this stuff interests you or you don't trust the system.
Jeremy Falcon
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If you are employed as a programmer in a company, how much money relative to your salary is justified for work equipment such as computers?
Licenses for tools excluded, as a programmer you simply depend on certain tools.
From my point of view, I would expect at least 1% of my salary for my computer. Am I exaggerating?
Thank you in advance.
modified yesterday.
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I don't think of it that way. But I will say that both "too little" and "too much" are to be avoided.
One of my past employers -- to some extent -- spent "too much". In one case declaring that all ETL developers (such as I) were to use a particular tool -- the most expensive one available -- even though SSIS was paid for (included with SQL Server) and did everything we needed it to. They also bought each developer an MSDN subscription, which we didn't need.
Knowing that an employer is willing to pay for what a developer asks for is good, but buying what the developer didn't request is a waste of money.
Also the general observation that many things which are "free" are often not worth the price.
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Ok, but let us assume we need to pay the employee let's say fictional $100K per year...
... after five year the developer needs a new PC (company guidelines, W10, W11, Wxyz!)...
... In my opinion, it is reasonable that the PC can costs $5K. Or is this completely absurd?
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What PC are you looking at that costs $5K in 2024?
$2K will get you a killer PC that should still perform very well in 5 years from now.
Maybe if you're throwing in a couple of large monitors, spare disks, etc but those all outlive the typical PC.
[Edit]
All of that said, I wholeheartedly agree that a developer's time costs more - a lot more - than PCs, so a PC that's so slow a dev has to constantly wait for things to happen is costing a company a lot more than the price of a new computer every couple of years.
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No sorry, but for $2K you get only something simple from my point of view.
I like to have 64GB memory for Windows and VS. I like also to have another 64GB of memory for let's say 8 VMs.
And of course 1TB SSD 
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Are you considering only list prices?
For about $2K USD, the laptop which I just bought is a Lenovo ThinkPad P16s Gen 3, which has 32GB and a 1TB drive. Intel Core Ultra 7. Windows 11 Pro. Unsure if I could have increased the RAM, but I doubt I'll need more unless I begin doing some video editing -- which I might.
As I mentioned in another post, I nominally got about 50% off through my employer -- the list price on the Lenovo site was greater than $4K USD at the time of purchase earlier this month.
So far, I've installed SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition (free) and Visual Studio 2022 Pro -- there was a post about a deal on that a few months back.
It does what I need so far -- e.g. some light SQL and C#
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I bought a pair of Beelink[*] SER5 Mini PCs with a Ryzen 5 (6 cores/12 logical processors) and 8GB RAM/500GB NVMe back in May; both have had a 64GB RAM upgrade and are now hosting VMs 24/7. I paid CAD$430 for both computers, and CAD$200 for each 64GB RAM upgrade kits.
I already had a pair of 2TB SSDs (coming out of another VM host that I've since retired) to host my VMs. More than enough space - one's using 800GB and the other 1.4TB. As I'm writing this, one's running 7 lives VMs, the other 6; both are currently using 40-something GB out of their respective 64. In other words, they still have quite a bit of resources still available, and I don't exactly go out of my way to shut down VMs even if I'm not gonna be using them for a few days.
It's "simple" enough in terms of system setup, but it's working out extremely well and the load on each is less than it was on the retired system they're now replacing. Sure, the CPUs aren't exactly latest-gen, but I don't feel like they're performing in a way that wastes my time.
Windows and VS licenses are provided by my employer through the MS Partner program. (Oh, and the systems both came fully licensed with Windows 11 anyway)
[*] If I ever spend money again on a full-tower system, 1000W power supply and stupidly power-hungry video card, it'll be my gaming rig.
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$5k would be 5% of your $100k salary, not 1%. Just sayin'.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Sorry, forgot to mention a five year intrevall...
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If you have a real day to day need for 8 VMs then I would expect you to need more than 1TB for storage.
Although not sure why you need 8 VMs day to day. Only reason I can think of is a Microservice Architecture which is not actually keeping the interfaces between each Microservice clean. Thus requiring frequent multi-service debug sessions. And if that is the case then better if the company spend money on fixing that.
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I've never given much thought to it.
I do know that larger enterprises pay less per unit than small businesses. They also (tend to) pay higher wages.
So, a mom-and-pop may pay 5K for a laptop for an employee they pay 75K -- and buy only the one.
While a large enterprise may pay 2.5K for the same laptop for an employee they pay 100K for the same work -- and replace it every couple of years whether it's necessary or not. (Boss: "You need to have your laptop replaced." Me: "But it's still working just fine.")
If you want an employer to increase their percentage -- would you rather they pay more for the same item, or pay you less?
Obviously, comparing percentage spent is not really important.
As an aside, I just bought a laptop -- my first. I got a "discount" through my employer -- about 50% off list price ("does anyone ever actually pay list price?", my wife asked, rhetorically). So that factors in as well, if you consider the "savings" to be sort of a "bonus" from my employer. I've gone this long without a laptop, I didn't really need one.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I don't think of it that way.
Totally tangential side note, but the wealthy think in percentages. It's the poor/middle class that refuse to. It's actually very smart to think in percents as that changes much less frequently than inflation rates.
Jeremy Falcon
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I wasn't dissing percentages themselves, but the comparison of percentages, which is fraught with peril. Which is pretty much what I was saying, though not very clearly perhaps.
Jeremy Falcon wrote: the poor/middle class
Well, it's not a matter of class. The less educated of whichever class are easily swayed by misuse of statistics -- percentages, graphs, etc.
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