I'm not sure where this sentiment is coming from. We're talking about business equipment with the aim of making a profit for your company here. If your company can only afford to provide $350 laptops to the software development team then they're going to have a hard time. That's not a value judgement, that's just a statement of fact.
It's like getting annoyed at logistics enterprises because they point out you need to lay out a few million dollars for trucks and warehouses. I can't afford to do that so it looks like, even if I wanted to, I'm not going to start a heavy goods transport business.
Though of course if your area is ever discovered (including remote work) the high value companies will come after you for the cheap good developers, give them better machines and repeat the rewards of good developers.
That holds true for other industries. Taking logistics: maybe a company uses motorbikes to move smaller packages around, rather than lorries, storing outdoors, etc. It still doesn't answer my question of where the "just don't be poor" sentiment came from. Maybe the OP is just having a bad day :-)
However, and please don't read this as charity, I would be really happy to send you some of my outdated equipment.
I have a Precision 5520 (Xeon E3-150M v6, 512G NVMe, 16G DDR4, ANSI Keyboard) which I bought with my own money that is collecting dust, it will fry any of those machines you mentioned.
I will send it for you for no money, just shipping (from EU).
Uh, how should it be read then?
$300 is a high, but not unheard of hourly rate here...
> $20k is about half of what I take home a year in the EU
So… roughly $3300 a month? One of my friends makes 10× less than that. It's right around the mean salary.
Edit: I originally stated (incorrectly) that $300 is close to the median salary. It's even worse — it's a mean. Our bureau of statistics doesn't publish the median, and I mixed them up.
I also make significantly less than that, and it's considered a good salary here.
> computer that is less than 10 years old
I checked several online stores just to be sure. They have lots of new laptop models with 2-core Celeron CPUs (or low-tier Intel i3s), and 4 GBs RAM, for $350 or a bit more. They've been selling like hot potatoes since the start of the pandemic because many can't afford anything else (and didn't have a computer before that — too expensive).
But yeah, we should just stop being poor. I get it.