A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how developer’s need faster hard disks. Now I’ll try to expand on that and build a case for how much it might be costing you to continue using that standard build corporate development PC. You’re probably like many other developers out there and using a standard-build office PC, possibly with a little boost of RAM to allow you to run some local databases along with your development environment. Of course, this is all assuming that you are like most developers out there that use a PC purchased and supplied by your company.
If you’re like me and work with .NET for most of your day and spend time developing with Visual Studio, you should start paying attention to how much time you end up waiting for your PC to complete any operation that makes you wait. (This also applies to PHP or Java developers, using Eclipse or any other Java-driven development environment.) For example, switching between Code and Design view can cause long waits on complex projects. What about cleaning, compiling and debugging your code? Starting up your browser? Hitting an exception and switching to debug in Visual Studio? All these little waits add up and 10-15 cumulative minutes of your day spent waiting is not an unrealistic figure.
So what is a Developer’s time worth?
Here are some assumptions, based on the UK market average salary for a “.NET developer” (avg. salary taken from itjobswatch.co.uk) 
If we take our worst case estimate of 15 minutes spent “waiting” each day, then we can extrapolate the following based on a 37.5 hour week: 
The best case estimate of “waiting” 10 minutes each day:
Now looking at the Dell website (I’m not biased towards Dell in any way and I’m only using them to provide a quick comparative cost), an Optiplex 960 with the following specification:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz, 1333MHz, 6MB)
- 4GB 800Mhz Non-ECC DDRII Memory
- Drive 1: 74GB 2.5 inch Serial ATA (10,000rpm)
- Drive 2: 160GB 2.5 inch Serial ATA (7,200rpm)
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 with a maximum 256MB of shared video memory
- 16x DVD-ROM
- Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit (free upgrade to Windows 7, or add £5 to downgrade to XP pro SP3)
- 3yr warranty next business day
This costs £873.00 excl. VAT (and businesses would claim back VAT anyway) at today’s prices – 11 August 2009. This desktop spec is targeted at a typical web-developer. If you’re going to be doing any serious graphics or .NET WPF, consider adding the “ATI Radeon HD 3470 256MB DDR2 full height DVI/VGA Output” for an extra £97.00. I’ve left out the monitor, keyboard and mouse because you should have those on your current machine. We’re pricing an upgrade here, with the aim of passing your standard-build back into the office pc-pool.
No matter how high-spec the new PC, its never going to perform operations instantly, so we’re never going to save ALL of that 15 minutes per day. Even if we could reduce it to half the time, or less, then this exercise is probably worthwhile. Most IT business cases that I have seen, want to pay themselves back within 3 years, and as long as we can shave at least a third off that “waiting” time, then we’re in business!
There’s also an additional benefit that is harder to attach a price to. When typical developers end up waiting for a long-running task to complete, they probably context-switch themselves onto another task to try and keep up efficiency. I firmly believe that any serious development should be done without distractions (I’ll save the detail for another post), and this “context-switching” could be considered a distraction. What if you forget to go back and finish some task after switching over to reading an email, for example? Maybe you’ve just inadvertently introduced a bug…? How much time and money does that cost, since it might affect you, as well as anyone else involved in checking or using your software.
So development team managers:
Take another look at the equipment your team is using and ask yourself “how much are those standard-build PC’s really saving me by being cheaper than a higher-spec version?”
Hi Neil, this is a great article!
Perhaps you could expand on the ideas you express here with your views on a decent high-spec development environment? I’ve read in the past that other factors, such as the number of monitors and even workstation layout can all affect productivity and thus could change the overall equation you describe above! Might be fun to factor those in too
Hello, superb post.