[kstrauser]

This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do their job to save $14? That's idiocy.

The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model was being replaced:

"Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of 24GB?"

"That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day, over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered."

"You know... good point. 64GB it is, then."

And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of them.

[lossyalgo]

My company doesn't OK basically any software requests, even cheap stuff :( We also don't make anywhere near $10k/mo (not USA). REcently got a new dev machine and it had 512GB m2 SSD and 16GB of RAM. I had to order 32GB but I had to explain why: to run docker images (and i'm hitting limits with 32GB constantly). I had to wait 2 weeks for the RAM upgrade. I wanted a bigger SSD but it would have taken longer and I needed to upgrade ASAP. It doesn't even have a USB-C plug (but a SD card slot, good grief).

[mulmen]

Careful, at some companies that kind of talk leads to discontinuing catered lunch.

[kstrauser]

I would not be working at one of those companies in the first place.

[Mashimo]

> You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month,

Mhh, far from it.