Employee productivity

Productivity is a lot more than buying your developers fast PC’s, however I have written before about the mismatch between employees and their employers about how they value their productivity.  I have even noticed it in the Microsoft channel 9 videos that you see key developers and testers struggling along with 2 or three old CRT monitors when they should obviously have LCDs now days.  So it’s nice when you come across a company that’s prepared to invest:

Over the coming months our four summer interns are going to be developing a product that requires of a server and two clients, so we’ll need three VMs to simulate the complete environment. We bought high-end, dual-Xeon Dell workstations with dual monitors and 2 GB of memory each (that’s our new standard developer workstation) which will make it easy and fast to simulate the complete production environment on every intern’s computer. It’s probably overkill and you can run VMware happily on less pumped-up computers, but if you’re simulating a network of three machines VMware definitely benefits from lots of RAM and CPUs.

As always if you want a broader view on productivity, check out my other posts, or read PeopleWare.