[nness]

So, hardware purchases for large organisations (and what I assume might be a government agency or government vendor) seems to be driven more from strategic sourcing relationships and cost as a priority, and actual technical requirements second. Seldom do people go "here's what we need, lets cost it!" More likely its a compromise between cost and service.

That being said, 4GB is stupidly low for a development machine and that should be alarming for the development team (6GB is not much an improvement).

I would argue the "works fine for most developers" point. What works now (the current state) is certainly not going to last. 4GB is already too low and it is only going to get more difficult as the requirements increase (bloat is a constant).

The conversation should be "what is the practical life of this hardware and do we intend to upgrade when it runs out." You should think about performance hits (in the people sense, not hardware sense) if these environments are abandoned by your developers. All hardware purchases have an effective life and what you've described is a purchase which will barely last another 12 months, imho.

[insamniac]

Yeah it's not a single company making the hardware decisions. Like most government contract situations it's more akin to a 20 company gang bang at a public facility using shared work space and hardware.

I don't even know where I'd begin to petition for a change. This was mostly just my way of ranting somewhere I'd get support, since no one made a peep on the internal comment I posted. I don't think most developers are fine with the 4GB situation. Those that are don't matter, and the others have likely just been beaten into submission or don't want to be seen as fussy.