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Avocet Systems, Inc. : The Complete Solution for Embedded Systems
Development Tools
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Embedded Update
Buying Productivity
Regular readers of the Embedded Update know by now that a lot of the material
comes from Softaid's experiences and those of our subscribers. The latest adventure
stems from our recent replacement of most of the computers here.
Two years ago we put top-end 486-66s on all of the engineers' desks. This month
these went to the metaphorical scrap heap, replaced by Dell Pentium-133s loaded
with everything.
The wags tell us that money can't buy happiness. Maybe so, but it can surely
buy productivity.
The facts: compile times, for our biggest program (150,000 lines of C) went
from 30 minutes to 4. Windows help files, previously needing almost 4 hours
to build, now complete in 12 minutes. The biggest and klunkiest utilities that
were at least annoying in their 10s of seconds of load times now start up in
under a second.
These sorts of time savings translate into immediate real productivity improvements.
Those of you still slaving over a machine using yesterday's technology take
note: you owe it to yourself and to your company to convince them to start upgrading
machines now.
There's a "sweet spot" in desktop computer technology. The fastest
and best machines always price our around $4k or a bit less. In 1988 these were
386-25s. Now the P-133s hold the speed/price title.
That $4k/machine is a pittance compared to the salary of an engineer. Too many
companies fail to recognize that arming an expensive designer with crummy, slow
tools is nothing more than a very efficient way of burning $1000 bills. Yet,
we talk to engineers all the time working on 386 desktop boxes with 40 Mb of
hard disk space.
This corporate stinginess extends to other areas as well. Read DeMarco's and
Lister's Peopleware: their tests conclude that a private office and some quiet
can yield almost a 3-fold improvement in programming productivity. Yet at most
large companies armies of engineers live in seas of noisy cubicles.
Business Week's October 2, 1995 issue claimed productivity in the USA is going
way up, mostly as a result of computerization. It's nice to know that all of
this technology is finally paying off... when companies chose to invest in it.
Now we've got to do something about those "ancient" (6 month old)
Pentium 90s...
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