It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.

Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.

Except there was photoshop involved.

And a solitary 15" monitor.

And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).

After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..

The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.

We'd kill for 'business desktop' machines. We have left-over HP tower servers, some of which were customer returns.

But we have TWO MONITORS!!! as the recruiter who got me in here pointed out.

Personally, I bring in my MacBook Pro and hook it up to one of my TWO MONITORS!!! because it's a much better environment than the rubbish tower server they gave me.

Well you could kill for the business desktop machines at my prior job, but it would be like killing someone for their socks.

1GB RAM powerhouses with 5400 RPM disks.

I lobbied hard for 6 months, doing research for them, laying out how little it would cost to buy new machines, and an additional monitor for all the developers, going so far as to do benchmarks of our software on my home machine (consumer-level $1200 Core i7) compared to the work cast-offs.

I quit when it was clear they did not care about the concerns of the developers at all, just cared for milking the sole golden goose.

But managers who did little more than PowerPoint, Outlook and surfing the net got budget to upgrade their laptops to specs that outclassed any machine the engineers had, it was pretty depressing.

Luxury .... We used to have to get up 10mins before we went to sleep, toggle the OS into a turing machine with our teeth and pay SAP for doing it.....

Your company overclocks your workstations? What's the story behind that?

Our hardware is sourced from a local supplier who specializes in gamer builds. The cooling is top notch so we thought we'd run a couple of machines at 3.5Ghz.

We're a medium-sized startup with a rocking VP of engineering, so there's no push to "standardize" on shitty HP or Dell machines, thank god.