For how much we all bitch about beancounters, I'm kind of surprised that beancounters haven't managed to convince management to buy bottom-of-the-barrel Celeron laptops for software developers.
Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people instead of some monstrosity with a 256 cores CPU and 48 TB of RAM and 24 exabytes of enterprise SSD and an RTX Cinco Grande connected via optical fiber to the Amazonflare Cloudnet. We will see lean and mean software literally overnight.
> Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people
Are you sure it’s the engineers who are being complacent? I know quite a few coders who’d love nothing more than to spend months on optimizations eking out small performance gains. Their bosses (or the market) don’t let them.
Because shipping fast almost always beats speed/memory optimization. The only reason to even do performance optimization is if it is a constraint on the problem itself (e.g. you work in gaming or HFT).
If shipping fast means you spend an extra $1000 once per developer, guess what almost every company is going to do?
I have access to a couple of Macbook Pros and a Linux machine with very good processors, but I do my hobby development all in an old Macbook Air. That allows me to see when my code runs slowly much more clearly. On an M1, everything just runs so fast you don't notice when you have a serious performance issue which is painfully obvious on the Macbook Air! I recommend doing that, though it does require patience waiting for things that are instant on the better machines.
I've always (well, since Pentium days at least) said you don't actually want your devs using top-end machines, at least for testing and debugging. You want them using the minimum target hardware. That way they'll actually care when the product slow on low end hardware, which will make it usable there and snappy on high end hardware. I've certainly caught a few accidentally-exponential style UI issues which were unnoticeable on a new workstation but very obvious on a slower machine.
It should be possible to achieve the same end by forcing management to use the "hardware of the people", getting them to do nontrivial on-call duty frequently, and making them dogfood what they make.
The real fucking assholes are the ones that enable the fucking assholes you refer to.
I use "monster" desktops for my development. I appreciate luxury of language servers, proper syntax highlighting, smart complete etc. etc. Output results however are absolutely tiny (for what they do) single executable enterprise backends, firmware for microcontrollers etc. etc. Also produce desktop same style software. Runs fine on ancient computers.
So there is a use for fat development stations. Increases my productivity which is very important as I am an independent vendor and pay for all my tools.
Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people instead of some monstrosity with a 256 cores CPU and 48 TB of RAM and 24 exabytes of enterprise SSD and an RTX Cinco Grande connected via optical fiber to the Amazonflare Cloudnet. We will see lean and mean software literally overnight.