Ask HN: Why do companies issue crappy machines to developers?

> What is the rationale for companies to do this kind of short-sighted thing?

Saving money is pretty much the only thing I can come up with. I certainly don't agree with any of it. The laptop piece might be a bit of DR (everyone has their work PC with them, so we don't need an emergency office).

Everyone in our company gets Threadripper workstations these days. Currently we are handing out Thinkstation P620s. We don't play games with bullshit dev machines anymore. All of that frustration is reserved for our cloud vendors.

Let me give you a real life example: my company, very large, US-based with global presence, non-IT.

- we buy every year about 10,000 laptops. Not one model because some are not available on all continents, but a small number of models.

- we buy less than 400 laptops/year for IT people, that is 4% of the total

- out of the IT people, over 80% are using the laptops just for emails, Excel and PowerPoint, so regular computers are fine.

- the rest of ~100 laptops/year out of 10,000/year means just 1% of the total. The guys in charge of equipment purchasing are measured on cost savings, they could not care less about the 1% with special needs

- out of the 100/year, the smart ones don't do heavy lifting on their laptops, but on servers or special use desktops (ex: Threadripper machines) that are very adequate for their needs. The less smart ones get what is called "engineering laptops" with more CPU cores and RAM and larger screens, but the thermal limits in the laptops are still there, so the problem is just partially solved at a high cost.

In the past I worked in an engineering department where the dept manager took care that everyone had equipment matching their needs. That was a great manager and this is how this should work, but in modern companies mid-level managers are mostly a bunch of politruks and I am saying this as a long-time IT manager working with many external parties.

I do not know and by now I do not care. I switched to contracting/freelancing and hardware/tooling is mostly my own responsibility (was one of top 3 reasons why I switched). Loving my mildly overkill desktop machine now.

My 2 cents from working in IT

Where I work now, we do issue developers better laptops than the usual we give out, however they are all the same make and model with no one offs.

It makes keeping track of equipment and inventory easier, and if ever someone needs a new one we just load up one with a pre-built image we made with all the programs and settings pre-installed, and its good to go with little hassle. My guess is other companies have similar reasons, except maybe they want a standard laptop model used by all employees who need one, regardless of role. Sometimes its because an IT department may have only a shoestring budget to work off of due to execs wanting to save money.

Well, in my case, I have been using laptops for development for at least ten years. I can easily afford a real powerhouse desktop, but I have deliberately chosen laptops.

Most of the time, I don't need a huge amount of power. I'm not rebuilding the Linux core, every time I compile; usually an app.

For my server work, all I really need, is an FTP connection, a browser, and a text editor.

The reason that I prefer laptops, is that, every now and then, I need to take the show on the road, and it is very convenient to just yank my main device out of the dock, and drop it into a backpack, without worrying about syncing. I tend to do native Apple work, in Swift, using Xcode, so it is important to have a lot of local files. I can't really do the work remotely, on a cloud.

When I was still in my "day job," the company issued me a laptop (because I was a manager, and traveled a lot). I brought a laptop for my own work, because that was all done in "nights and weekends." I often threw my personal laptop in with my work laptop, when I traveled.

Nowadays, I have an M1Max 14-inch MacBook Pro. It is pretty much maxxed. Every bit as powerful as any desktop I've ever used. Xcode is still fairly klunky on it, because the code in Xcode is ... classic. I don't think a Mac Pro would be any real help.

But when I'm docked (which is most of the time), I'm running on an LG Ultrawide (49-inch, 5120 X 1440) monitor. Even the 16-inch can't hold a candle to that, so the 14-inch is better for me.

But that's me, and my workflow. YMMV.