My guess is the answer is probably yes, if you give your developers slower machines, they will start optimizing things for performance. However, I suspect they

My guess is the answer is probably yes, if you give your developers slower machines, they will start optimizing things for performance. However, I suspect they won't spend the time optimizing what you want them to. Good developers HATE being inefficient. Sitting around waiting for something to compile gets your out of the flow of writing and testing code. So instead of spending all their time optimizing the app, I suspect they'll spend a disproportionate amount of time optimizing the build process. Not really the outcome you want... Now, as you suggest, if there's a way to slow down only the running of the app, and not the rest of the development process, that would be useful and probably would cause the sort of changes you're looking for.