Modern software is very complex unfortunately. Especially with proliferation of PaaS like kubernetes and container technology. You often need to have local vers

Modern software is very complex unfortunately. Especially with proliferation of PaaS like kubernetes and container technology. You often need to have local version of entire PaaS running to be able to effectively debug problems or test new features. Plus all different services like sql/nosql databases, key value stores, message queues, web servers etc. Of course, some people will say why are you using IDE? I hear this often from hardcore vim users. "Just use vim". But that realistically doesn't save much memory and Chrome is another memory hog. And what if you do some mobile work and need to open Android Studio or XCode, another several GBs of memory needed just for that. Also don't forget about the whole suite of collaboration tools used at work which we didn't really have before like Slack, Dropbox, JIRA, Google Docs, Github, JIRA. You will have all of these opened either in browser or as standalone apps to be more productive. People with powerful computers will be more effective. You can do almost everything on older less advanced computer but you will be less productive than somebody with newest tech. I remember in 2011 working for a company in London where every developer workstation had 64GB RAM. That was 7 years ago so I am surprised 16GB is considered as too much in 2017.