> can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.
Efficiency is a good product goal: Benchmarks and targets for improvement are easy to establish and measure, they make users happy, thinking about how to make things faster is a good way to encourage people to read the code that's there, instead of just on new features (aka code that's not there yet)
However they don't sell very good: Your next customer is probably not going to be impressed your latest version is 20% faster than the last version they also didn't buy. This means that unless you have enough happy customers, you are going to have a hard time convincing yourself that I'm right, and you're going to continue to look for backhanded ways of making things better.
But reading code, and re-reading code is the only way you can really get it in your brain; it's the only way you can see better solutions than the compiler, and it's the only way you remember you have this useful library function you could reuse instead of writing more and more code; It's the only guaranteed way to stop software bloat, and giving your team the task of "making it better" is a great way to make sure they read it.
When you know what's there, your next feature will be smaller too. You might even get bonus features by making the change in the right place, instead of as close to the user as possible.
Management should be able to buy into that if you explain it to them, and if they can't, maybe you should look elsewhere...
> a much slower machine
Giving everyone laptops is also one of those things: They're slow even when they're expensive, and so developers are going to have to work hard to make things fast enough there, which means it'll probably be fine when they put it on the production servers.
I like having a big desktop[1] so my workstation can have lots of versions of my application running, which makes it a lot easier to determine which of my next ideas actually makes things better.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501119
Using the best/fastest tools I can is what makes me faster, but my production hardware (i.e. the tin that runs my business) is low-spec because that's cheaper, and higher-spec doesn't have a measurable impact on revenue. But I measure this, and I make sure I'm always moving forward.