
Worth it to build a PC for remote software engineer? - lliamander
Question for remote software engineers&#x2F;software developers who use their own custom built PC for work:<p>- Do you find you get a reasonable performance uplift from a desktop over a laptop?<p>- What&#x27;s a good sweet spot in terms of price?<p>- How do you negotiate with your employer so that you can use your own hardware for work?<p>- How do you deal with switching between your PC and an employer provided laptop?<p>- Do you write of the expense on your taxes?<p>- How often do you upgrade?<p>I&#x27;m contemplating building a Linux-based development machine (gaming is <i>not</i> a consideration) for doing back-end web service development.<p>EDIT: fix formatting
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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.

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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.

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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.

