It's been over a year, and I'm still angry. Let's say that a "good" desktop computer is $10,000. Just load the thing with enterprise scale SSDs, fast spinning

It's been over a year, and I'm still angry. Let's say that a "good" desktop computer is $10,000. Just load the thing with enterprise scale SSDs, fast spinning disks, CPUs, RAM and so forth. I think you'll be hard pressed to spend that much on something that you'd want near a desk. (I'm assuming that you've already bought the developer the two or three large displays and a decent graphics card). Let's say this gets builds down from 4 hours to 1 hour, and a developer has to do a build like this on average once a day. At $80/hour, this takes 42 hours, or maybe two months (spread out) to breakeven. By NOT buying your developers great machines, you are costing your company money. "But that comes out of a different budget!" Who cares? The shareholders (who the management chain proxies) should be delighted that developers have faster machines. Of course, multi-hour builds are nonsense, too. MS has a whole cloud infrastructure that they should be leveraging the crap out of, to make sure that developers are the bottleneck again. I'll bet they could get Windows to build inside ten minutes, if they put the right people on it.