I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.
When Apple switched to their own silicon, I was maintaining the build systems at a scaleup.
After I saw the announcement, I immediately knew I needed to try out our workflows on the new architecture. There was just no way that we wouldn't have x86_64 as an implicit dependency all throughout our stack. I raised the issue with my manager and the corporate IT team. They acknowledged the concern but claimed they had enough of a stockpile of new Intel machines that there was no urgency and engineers wouldn't start to see the Apple Silicon machines for at least another 6-12 months.
Eventually I do get allocated a machine for testing. I start working through all the breakages but there's a lot going on at the time and it's not my biggest priority. After all, corporate IT said these wouldn't be allocated to engineers for several more months, right? Less than a week later, my team gets a ticket from a new-starter who has just joined and was allocated an M1 and of course nothing works. Turns out we grew a bit faster than anticipated and that stockpile didn't last as long as planned.
It took a few months before we were able to fix most of the issues. In that time we ended up having to scavenge under-specced machines form people in non-technical roles. The amount of completely avoidable productivity wasted from people swapping machines would have easily reached into the person-years. And of course myself and my team took the blame for not preparing ahead of time.
Budgets and expenditure are visible and easy to measure. Productivity losses due to poor budgetry decisions, however, are invisible and extremely difficult to measure.
You are suggesting a level of due process that is wildly optimistic for most companies. If you are an IC, such blame games are entirely resolved behind closed doors by various managers and maybe PMs. Your manager may or may not ask you for supporting documentation, and may or may not be able to present it before the "retrospective" is concluded.
I could perhaps have been clearer with that point - this was more about public perception. People have a tendency to jump to conclusions - build system is not working, must be the build system team's fault.
But regardless, I already left there a few years back.
Actually, just time spent compiling, or waiting for other builds to finish makes investing in the top level macbook pro worth it every 3 years. I think the calculation assumed something like 1-2% of my time was spent compiling, and I cost like $100k per year.
Who is still doing builds on developer laptops instead of a remote build farm? You can have so much more compute available when it doesn't need to be laptop form factor.
Not for an enterprise buying (or renting) furniture in bulk it isn’t. The chair will also easily last a decade and be turned over to the next employee if this one leaves… unlike computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months even if your dev sticks around anyway.
> computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months
That seems unreasonably short. My work computer is 10 years old (which is admittedly the other extreme, and far past the lifecycle policy, but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it).
> My work computer is 10 years old... but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it
It depends what you're working on. My work laptop is 5 years old, and it takes ~4 minutes to do a clean compile of a codebase I work on regularly. The laptop I had before that (which would now be around 10 years old) would take ~40 minutes to compile to the same codebase. It would be completely untenable for me to do the job I do with that laptop (and indeed I only started working in the area I do once I got this one).
That’s more or less my point from a different angle: unlimited spend isn’t reasonable and the justification “but $other_thing is way more expensive!” Is often incorrect.
I think my employer hed a contest to see which of 4 office chairs people liked the most, then they bought the one that everyone hated. I’m not quite sure anymore what kind of reason was given.
Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.
For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.
The breakeven rate on developer hardware is based on the value a company extracts not their salary. Someone making X$/year directly has a great deal of overhead in terms of office space and managers etc, and above that the company only employees them because the company gains even more value.
Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.
Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.
