Hello,
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask (and feel free to move this post if another category is more appropriate), but I figured that there would be enough people with deep experience with this here.
Driven partially by COVID this year, the company I work for (finance startup) moved to remote first, which has allowed us to look at potential candidates from a lot of new places where we don't have offices. One issue that we're having trying to onboard new people where we can't simply ask them to come into an office and pick up their PC.
Right now, we have some standard "enterprise-y" providers that assemble a machine, send it to our office where one person deploys the standard image, installs the applications then couriers it to the new employee. Seems a bit inefficient - both from a cost and shipping things to and fro perspective.
Does anybody know of good "build-to-spec" suppliers that are a bit more "technical" and less "enterprisey" that can build machines according to our specs and send them to various countries. Ideally, they could deploy a custom image we give them or alternately, I guess we can send a USB stick to the employee and an assembled machine sent directly from the supplier to them, and the employee mates the two.
I guess the main gripes I have about our current suppliers is a lack of sensibility - things like trying to charge us VAT on a machine to be sent outside the EU, or making us wait for weeks for a specific part that is backordered while there are perfectly reasonable alternatives available - and not telling us. We're less worried about standard enterprisey things - like warranties or ongoing support, so we're wondering if there are suppliers that are more aligned to what we want, without all the faff around it. "Build spec A developer machine, send to developer. Build spec C researcher machine, send to new researcher."
Has anyone here dealt with similar issues or know of good suppliers that we could look into?
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask (and feel free to move this post if another category is more appropriate), but I figured that there would be enough people with deep experience with this here.
Driven partially by COVID this year, the company I work for (finance startup) moved to remote first, which has allowed us to look at potential candidates from a lot of new places where we don't have offices. One issue that we're having trying to onboard new people where we can't simply ask them to come into an office and pick up their PC.
Right now, we have some standard "enterprise-y" providers that assemble a machine, send it to our office where one person deploys the standard image, installs the applications then couriers it to the new employee. Seems a bit inefficient - both from a cost and shipping things to and fro perspective.
Does anybody know of good "build-to-spec" suppliers that are a bit more "technical" and less "enterprisey" that can build machines according to our specs and send them to various countries. Ideally, they could deploy a custom image we give them or alternately, I guess we can send a USB stick to the employee and an assembled machine sent directly from the supplier to them, and the employee mates the two.
I guess the main gripes I have about our current suppliers is a lack of sensibility - things like trying to charge us VAT on a machine to be sent outside the EU, or making us wait for weeks for a specific part that is backordered while there are perfectly reasonable alternatives available - and not telling us. We're less worried about standard enterprisey things - like warranties or ongoing support, so we're wondering if there are suppliers that are more aligned to what we want, without all the faff around it. "Build spec A developer machine, send to developer. Build spec C researcher machine, send to new researcher."
Has anyone here dealt with similar issues or know of good suppliers that we could look into?
