The productivity gain that everyone ignores

Your team can become much more productive today! And the cost is very small relative to the cost of your developers!

You think that managers would be very interested in this sales pitch, yet almost none of them will buy it.

What am I talking about? Buying your development team new hardware. This especially applies if you’re developing in a language in .NET or Java where you have to compile your project.

I was excited to read this post today because this team gets it. One of their big improvements was to get solid-state drives for their code.

I’m trying to figure out how this doesn’t make sense. If you’re paying your developers $70-90k a year, why wouldn’t you spend a couple hundred dollars for a solid-state drive to help them get things done faster? If your team needs a profiler or ReSharper or some other software package, that request is almost always approved.

Compilation time on big .NET projects (even medium-sized .NET projects) is brutal. It totally slows down your momentum. There really isn’t much else you can do during this time (most developers check email, check Twitter, surf the web, etc.). Wouldn’t you like that to be productive time?