here's the argument that Brad Fitzpatrick (who espoused this idea) gave: at the time, he was creating livejournal and had a bunch of russian hackers building the site. He noticed that every time they made pages load faster or work better, more people used the site (and site growth is the simple most important metric), and that more and more people were coming from countries with poor internet infra.
So, he made his workers use crappy computers and a dodgy network he set up. He claimed it made them make better applicaitons, but I can easily say that if the job hadn't been critically important for me, I'd give my opinion and move on.
I build software for Aristocrats and I expect my tools to be first class. That said, I've reached a level of trust where my l eadership trusts me to manage millions of dollars worth of cloud inventory and much of my messaging to my users is: "please do not attept to save $400 by using $1000 of your time"
A better approach is to simply buy your devs 2 computers:
1 fast PC for speedy development and 1 slow laptop for testing. It makes no sense to give developers a slower computer simply to make them develop better. It's like saying that post office workers must now use bicycles instead of motor vehicles in order to encourage them to find shortcuts. I'm not a successful CEO, though, so maybe I'm just talking out my ass.
yes, as the chromeos person mentioned upthread, you have a dev infra that is fat, and a user testing environment that represents the user experience. Devs don't need to hobble their machines. I argued with Brad about this many times...
So, he made his workers use crappy computers and a dodgy network he set up. He claimed it made them make better applicaitons, but I can easily say that if the job hadn't been critically important for me, I'd give my opinion and move on.
I build software for Aristocrats and I expect my tools to be first class. That said, I've reached a level of trust where my l eadership trusts me to manage millions of dollars worth of cloud inventory and much of my messaging to my users is: "please do not attept to save $400 by using $1000 of your time"