Consultant’s Superiors Gave Them Slow Laptops While Everyone Else Received High-Speed Machines, So They Found An Ingenious Way To Get New Ones

Mila Cardozo

15 minutes ago

Freepik/Reddit

Imagine if you were a chef working for a restaurant, but all they provided was a dull knife. What would you do?

This is basically what happened in this story when a consultant’s superiors gave him a slow laptop to work with.

He and his coworkers found an ingenious way to get better laptops.

Here’s what they did.

Give me a slow laptop coz I am a consultant – expect slower throughput

So this happened more than a decade ago when I worked as a consultant to a major pharma company.

Now to be fair, they were great people, nice working culture etc, very friendly relations between the pharma company devs and our devs. All great.

Great work from home policy (in fact, all of us consultants worked remotely).

Everything except ONE thing.

We all had laptops (shipped to the consultants) with very heavy software running on it and it was both CPU and memory-intensive. Again, totally fair.

But it made their jobs more difficult.

As developers, our job was to run these locally run the code and develop it, modify it etc. One *BIG* difference.

The regular employees got really great, fast, high-speed machines.

As “Consultants” we got the lower end ones, despite all of us having to debug and update the same code!

We brought this up to our team leads/managers/VP and to their higher-ups that “hey our overall throughput would be significantly higher and your own cost would go down if our laptops could run these local servers faster”.

But they didn’t want to.

The employee developers and team leads also helped us make that same case.

Average laptop cost is say $1500 for a high end (at the time).

The average cost of the lower end one say $800.

So a difference of $700 per consultant (times say 10 consultants) would have brought the total cost to say $7K.

It didn’t make sense.

Total amount of extra HOURS we billed them due to this is MUCH MUCH higher.

But of course the bean counters at the parent company said, “no way in hell are we giving the lowly consultants the best machines”.

Add to that our main business point of contact was a real piece or work and pushed back *just as vehemently*.

After lots of pleading arguing etc, we gave up.

They needed a plan.

Now our strategy was simple.

We’d simply get less work done in the day. To give everyone an idea of how this works…

Each time you change a line of code and save.

To recompile + restart the server locally, it would easily take 10 mins on our consultant laptops (as opposed to just 3 mins on the employee laptops).

We would deliberately make it compile multiple times.

It worked well.

When the employee business team complained, we’d screen-share and show them each time they complained how long it took for even minor changes.

Funny thing was the consultants were all remote so we’d put the code to compile and go have coffee or do household chores lol.

Their lame business contact tried to crack the whip on us, we said “hey there really IS no way for us to go quicker without quicker laptops”.

After 6 months of them falling behind on projects AND being over billed due to more hours being spent, they FINALLY woke up from their slumber and upgraded our laptops to bring them in line with the employee ones!

They won.

Of course 2 months after we got better laptops, I found a much better job and left.

Still reminisce about those long coffee breaks though! 😉 Funniest part was when I called their helpdesk once.

The agent quite literally admitted.

“You know I have worked here for 10 years now and I’ll NEVER understand why the Directors and VPs need top of the line laptops when all they run is word excel and powerpoint.”

“Meanwhile the ones actually doing the heavy computing get 5-year-old laptops”.

Amusing anecdote, lol.

Well, duh! Took them long enough to figure that out.

What did Reddit think?

Maybe that could work.