There are a few places that kind of go 'to the nines' for employees and give adequate and even overpowered workstations. I think the crowd that gets that treatment is slightly over-represented on HN.
But most businesses here are the same, you get lucky to get any nice feature over the 'same laptop that sales gets' which is barely more than a Chromebook. And getting an external monitor that's not the cheapest bulk-buy model was also pretty hard to do (I had a friend in marketing who helped me get a larger display with better colors at that place).
Or you go self employed and get your own fancy workstation since you know it’s easily worth your money in the long run. Don’t work for people that don’t understand this.
The rule of thumb is that a typical dev here is 250k fully loaded (benefits, office, etc). When you are trying hire and your are competing with Google and Facebook that extra 2K on the laptop kit is a rounding error. It’s hard to hire as FANGs are a sure thing money wise.
But most businesses here are the same, you get lucky to get any nice feature over the 'same laptop that sales gets' which is barely more than a Chromebook. And getting an external monitor that's not the cheapest bulk-buy model was also pretty hard to do (I had a friend in marketing who helped me get a larger display with better colors at that place).