[JohnFen]

> their development machines are Intel Xeon or AMD Threadripper monstrosities with abominable GPUs to match.

Not all developers. In my entire career, I've never had a development system that was better than the average consumer machine. And, honestly, I wouldn't want one that was, for the exact reasons you state.

[nneonneo]

Are you certain about that? I’d wager that the average (median?) consumer machine these days is a a smartphone, and not an especially high-end one at that.

[JohnFen]

Yes, I'm sure. I'm not counting smartphones in this at all, though, because I don't develop apps for smartphones anymore (it's not a market that interests me). By "average machine", I meant a budget laptop or tower.

[I_am_uncreative]

Yes, but if you need to compile something, isn't it nice to have those threads?

[JohnFen]

I've never been terribly bothered by compile times in general. 90% of my work is with compiled languages, and (in most languages) incremental compilation does a great job of keeping compile times low. Even for large projects on slow machines, I rarely see compile times exceed even a minute. More usually, compiling just takes a few seconds.

Sure, you do occasionally need to do a full recompile, and if the project is very large then this can take a nontrivial amount of time, but that doesn't really happen often enough for me to be bothered about.

If the project is of really significant size, or if the compiler/language/code structure is such that incremental compilation can't give you significant gains (or isn't even possible), you may need more grunt of course.

[swiftcoder]

If your software takes that much resources to compile, you may already be on the wrong end of this equation

[Dylan16807]

That's a very weak "may". Different languages and compilers vary in speed by orders of magnitude, when fed similar code with similar running speed.