
Working from Home: The Desks of FreeAgent Engineering - tobscher
https://engineering.freeagent.com/2020/05/18/working-from-home-the-desks-of-freeagents/
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GiorgioG
What's striking to me is the prevalence of laptops. As someone who has worked
from home for a very long time, my iMac and Desktop PCs are miles and miles
faster for software dev than any work-issued laptop I've ever had. Laptop CPUs
have not historically been able to compete with desktop CPUs. For remote
workers, give them the option of getting a desktop-class machine.

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lylo
FreeAgent CTO here. We now default to quad-core i7 32GB 13" MacBook Pros which
are super-flexible (travel, working in different locations etc) and definitely
powerful enough for local dev.

We benchmarked these when running tests locally against 16" hex-core MBP and
found comparatively little difference – CPU ultimately stops being the
bottleneck at some point.

It looks like mobile dev workflow (iOS and Android) benefits from more
powerful machines (and definitely 32GB RAM) but again it's a trade off over
power vs portability, the latter being important for our developers.

