QOTW: How do you rate the tech in your workplace?

[sanf789]

Workstations are being phased out in favour of virtual machines running RHEL. RHEL is by no means a modern desktop interface. You need a laptop in order to connect to the VM. We do have a competent computer farm for our computing needs. So, on that regard, it is OK.
The water cooler is old tech. The coffee machine does not even know when it is running out of water or of coffee beans. Kettle is the cheapest one the company found.
The main conference room that has the most tech is using Skype for Business. As such, people get confused on how to get the most of the tech there - I have not seen anybody use the pens on the 65" touch enabled TV. There is also a lot of confusion regarding meeting invites and a lot more if multiple sites are involved.
So yes, tech is good enough for us to do our jobs.

[KN1GHT]

I work for a relatively large and very successful bank here in South Africa.

Hardware wise I'd say most of the time our hardware is overkill though usually being one generation behind the latest and greatest.

For instance I'm still gunning it out with a Optiplex 9020 (i7-4790, 8GB Ram, R7-250)
Which is actually a little overkill for most office use, though I'd argue that I'm able to put the hardware to good use most of the time.

As for software we are security first and are not allowed to install software manually, which mean that we have an entire department that are responsible for the packaging and scripting/automation of software.

They're actually doing a commendable job at it and while nothing can actually be fully up to date, automation is a real boon.

We've only now started rolling out Windows 10 in stages, because 7th and 8th gen Intel compatibility forced our hand. Though I'd love the experience of windows 10 here in the work place after all the kinks are worked out, because of the amazing automation we have going, at the moment though everything is a mess and very chaotic.

The Company doesn't want to buy old stock and not a lot of departments can go over to Windows 10 yet, so we are stuck in the middle. Not enough old stock, but can't use our new stock either and still too many compatibility issues with Windows 10.

As soon as a user resigns or are upgraded we are like vultures on the older laptops so that we can assist users that are in immediate need of laptops.

Fun times.

[kalniel]

Well I seem to be in a minority, but our tech is in cutting edge . Perhaps not surprising if you've worked out the field I'm in, but even office related tech isn't bad at all.

[Rad77]

I'm a developer at a tech company (of sorts) so you'd think that having decent hardware should be a given. But it's a game of two halves...

On the plus side:

- I've recently been upgraded to a new PC (i7-7700, 16GB and an SSD) which is in most respects up to the job.
- I have three monitors
- Our LAN is gigabit.

On the minus side:
- I spent the last 10 years on 32-bit XP because of issues migrating some bits of our development environment away from that.
- The new PC was specced by someone else with a view to getting a responsive dev environment with fast Java compilation times. Sadly I currently don't write Java but I do use several large VMs and I'm constantly running out of both RAM and disk space, to the extent that I cannibalised the ancient HDD from my old PC to give me some breathing space.
- Yes, I have three monitors available but the PC only has two outputs (and one of those is VGA...). No prob, I stuck in a discrete card with two DVI outs... but the PC runs Ubuntu 18.04 and the desktop is flaky as hell when split over two adapters, so I'm back to two monitors.
- The mouse and keyboard provided were the "free" ones that came with the PC and were totally inadequate. I had to bring in one of my own mice and have scavenged an old Microsoft keyboard that was being thrown out.

There are factors at play here beyond just a penny pinching attitude. There is an inflexible mindset and a desire to exert control by some middle management which means that it's hard to tweak equipment to a setup that works best for the individual (eg. Because everyone else is, apparently, happy with two monitors then I can't have any budget to get my additional monitor running, despite the fact that I already have the three monitors set up and was running them on XP for several years).

[ultrasbm]

First - Anyone here that's using a terrible IT system, drop me a message

Second - At my company we're all using i7's or Ryzen 1800X, with min 32Gb RAM and at least a GTX970 (So we can game at lunch time/after work). Everyone has an SSD, and at least 2x 32" monitors. There's a leased line too, because #NoDropOut and it's that way because we don't want people to feel restricted and held back by the tech they're using.
I've worked as a dev previously working on multi-threaded application development - and they wouldn't even give me a machine with a dual core CPU in! I was developing on a single core Celeron! Oh the irony...

[shaithis]

Multiple 10Gbps internet connections
Core i7 CPUs
3 Monitors

I'd say we do alright for academia

[tonyd2233]

Windows 8... need i say more...

[cheesemp]

Work for a largish enterprise software company in one of the smaller offices doing dev. Tech is meh... oldish i7 in a cheap and nasty Lenovo box and 2 nasty budget 1080p monitors that they could only get working using a USB laptop hub Do have 2 SSDs mind but could otherwise be a lot better. Keyboard is one that came free with previous Dell PC and mouse is ~10 year old Microsoft 'Basic optical mouse' (I get home and look at my 2k 75Hz MVA £175 monitor and £70 mechanical keyboard and tend to want to cry.) Always feels minimum cost to do the job rather than making a nice working environment.

[nar53]

Ha ha thats a good one I'm retired and glad for it.

[katyperry]

I just love it. I am tech savvy and can't live without tech.

[TheAnimus]

It's wonderful, everyone loves it!

Obviously I'm unbiased as the CTO.

I have had to bribe people with Surface Laptops and Surface Books. Also everyone has 16:10 ratio screens, or 34". DevSpec is 32gb of RAM, everyone has SSDs etc.

[Dashers]

Interesting QOTW - it's nice to know how green the grass is elsewhere.

I work for a SME. Our hardware is never cutting edge, as these things take time to deploy, so by the time things have been specced and released it's a bit old - but never ancient.

Historically we've had some quite rubbish desktop kit, but that's improved. I've got a slightly old but adequate Xeon workstation with multiple vertical monitors providing essentially a 4K workspace. It's not the proper way, but it does the job.

Our infrastructure is pretty resilient.

Software is similar, we're always playing catch up on Microsoft stuff as by the time we've updated everything it's out of support.

Internal software varies from terrible vendor lock in products to agile in-house applications.

I have many gripes about where I work, but these days, kit isn't a bit issue.