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Worth it to build a PC for remote software engineer?

1 points by lliamander ↗ HN
Question for remote software engineers/software developers who use their own custom built PC for work:

- Do you find you get a reasonable performance uplift from a desktop over a laptop?

- What's a good sweet spot in terms of price?

- How do you negotiate with your employer so that you can use your own hardware for work?

- How do you deal with switching between your PC and an employer provided laptop?

- Do you write of the expense on your taxes?

- How often do you upgrade?

I'm contemplating building a Linux-based development machine (gaming is not a consideration) for doing back-end web service development.

EDIT: fix formatting

3 comments

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mattbillenstein
Big monitor or two is needed more than absolute top line cpu performance - I use a small nuc like system at work as a desktop.

At home, I have a PC with a big monitor for gaming and I ssh to my macbook for dev work from that using the ubuntu shell.

lliamander
Certainly screen real estate is important, but somewhat irrelevant to my question. I already have the monitor situation covered, so it's not like I'm having to make a trade-off between pixels and performance.

Just to clarify: I'm not asking whether a workstation desktop is necessary. I understand that it's not. I'm asking to whether it is a good investment, and how people have made that work with their employer's IT policies.

mattbillenstein
I don't know about IT policies, but I think any reasonably good IT org would just consider everyone's machine compromised -- owned by employer or employee both and take security measures commiserate to the needs of the business.

Regarding it being an investment - if you think anything can make you more productive and you can get the business to pay for it - sure, why not? Could be a chair or a desk or a coffee maker or a computer.