[mwcampbell]

I'm conflicted on this.

On the one hand, I wonder how much of the wasted CPU cycles can be attributed to carelessness that could easily be avoided, or caught early, if we developers deliberately used underpowered hardware for our own machines. Speaking for myself, my main workstation, where I also do most of the testing on my desktop apps, has a Core i7-4770 processor and 32 GB of RAM. Maybe if I used something more modest, like an ultrabook with only 8 GB of RAM, I'd be more likely to notice when I'm carelessly writing inefficient code.

On the other hand, as others have argued both on this thread and elsewhere, there's a trade-off between machine efficiency and developer productivity. We may argue that it's wrong to waste machine resources when the machines in question don't belong to us, but then again, developer productivity means we can crank out more features that drive sales and make users happy.