What’s delusional is highly paid engineers not investing money in essential tools to get their work done. A new laptop is 1-2% of the annual salary of many people here.
If you just work in one location only, sure. I work from home, the office, coffee shop. When Im at home I often like to code from the couch rather than the home office. Laptops add flexibility. I like their middle ground of flexibility and performance.
I’m also one of those “weird” people that don’t use an external monitor. And yet I’m still just as productive, probably more so, than most of my coworkers.
I like having two large monitors and a desktop-style "mechanical" keyboard, but there's absolutely a benefit to having a full productive work environment with you, with your data and work in progress, anywhere you might want to work - even if you're not online. And when you're in an office (or home office) environment, you just plug in and continue from where you left off.
A high-end MacBook Pro may not be cheap, but it packs some serious mobile compute power along with good battery life.
is BYOC that common at software companies these days? even if I wanted to "invest money in essential tools", I wouldn't be allowed to connect them to any company networks.
in any case, the most resource-intensive thing my work laptop does is have outlook and firefox open at the same time. the "heavy lifting" is done on a cloud instance that can be easily scaled up or down depending on what I'm currently working on.
I haven't used a company issued machine since 2017+18, and prior to that, literally never. So 13 months or so out of a nearly decade career. It helps I guess that I'm upfront with companies about being picky about hardware and Linux being a strict requirement (that one job was the lone and exception), they just shrug and go "sure, go for it dude".