[hn_throwaway_99]

> trust my judgment and buy what I ask, or you'll also make great savings on my salary

Baloney. I've seen tons of developers claim they need top-of-the-line everything, even if after some point it has no improvement on their productivity. And why not? I don't blame them, I'd want the "256 GB RAM, 36 CPU" beast the other commenter mentioned, too, even if I didn't need it.

I'm not at all saying this has to be an adversarial conversation. But, as people who like to call ourselves software "engineers", I don't at all understand the pushback to at least offering some sort of analytical justification when asking a business to spend gobs of money.

[HelloNurse]

I don't necessarily "need", I want my aggregate personal equipment to cost a large fraction of, say, my manager's company provided car. The justification is personal, not analytical.

Given a fixed high budget, it doesn't take much common sense to prefer something more useful (e.g. a spare laptop instead of a luxury chair and desk, or remote servers instead of some dangerous SaaS).