I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no way to move outward from where I currently live, show me where I’m gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is “more” than the local average by only around $10-15k.)

I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything. I’m riding rigs with 8 and 16GB of RAM and I have no way to go up from here. The AI boom has basically forced me out of the entire industry at this point. I can’t get hardware to learn, subscriptions to use, anything.

Big Tech has made it unaffordable for everyone.

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zozbot234 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

8GB or 16GB of RAM is absolutely a usable machine for many software development and IT tasks, especially if you set up compressed swap to stretch it further. Of course you need to run something other than Windows or macOS. It's only very niche use cases such as media production or running local LLM's that will absolutely require more RAM.

	▲	pqtyw 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> something other than Windows or macOS > 8GB No modern IDE either. Nor a modern Linux desktop environment either (they are not that much more memory efficient than Macos or windows). Yes you can work with not much more than a text editor. But why?

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ecshafer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The bright side is the bust is going to make a glut of cheap used parts.

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sneak 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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kotaKat 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh. I’m not allowed to own a home computer to try to further my own learning and education and knowledge then.

Guess I’ll go fuck myself now then.

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jfindper 6 hours ago | parent [-]

They're just using this comment section to brag about how well off they are, I wouldn't worry too much. They're completely out of touch.

	▲	bombcar 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's the "how much can the banana cost, $10?" of HN. The point they're trying to make is a valid one - a company should be willing to spend "some money" if it saves time of the employee they're paying. The problem is usually that the "IT Budget" is a separate portion/group of the company than the "Salary" budget, and the "solution" can be force a certain dollar amount has to be spent each year (with one year carry-forward, perhaps) so that the employees always have good access to good equipment. (Some companies are so bad at this that a senior engineer of 10+ years will have a ten year old PoS computer, and a new intern will get a brand new M5 MacBook.)