Yep. My new work laptop only has 16GB of RAM and it’s never been an issue. I’m usually running half a dozen containers, VS Code, Slack, Brave/Chrome, and a few other things. Maybe our work loads are just computationally lighter than some?

I ordered a 16GB Pro the other day to be my personal dev machine. I’m sure it’ll be more than fine. I’m upgrading from a 2013 8GB Pro which was only just starting to slow me down.

The code and compilation for me is the light part, and for the most part an hour's worth of essentially text editing for about a moment of compilation anyways.

My resource hogs are slack, mainly the browser, and Zoom calls are apparently the most computationally intensive thing in the world, especially if you screen share while you have an external plugged in.

Memory wise the reason I had to go from 8Gb to 16GB on my personal laptop was literally just for TravisCI.

Honestly, adding external monitors cripples MacBooks pretty quick, even unscaled 2 2k monitors will slow a 2015 15 down significantly (don't try and leave YouTube on either), and it gets worse from there once you start upgrading to 4k monitors. a 2017 15 is good for a 4k and a 2k, and gets a bit slow if you try and go dual 4k.

I planned on looking into eGPU solutions until IT offered me a new Macbook, and I convinced them I needed a 16" Pro.

tldr: External monitors or badly optimized applications (Zoom, YouTube, or browser based CI) will make most MacBooks feel sluggish pretty quick.

Are those displays in scaled mode? Scaled displays tend to perform badly on integrated graphics, and suck up memory, because it has to render a 2x or 3x size internally and then scale down for every frame. Running something that updates the screen constantly, like zoom, probably exacerbates that issue.