I showed up at the company and noticed you couldn't run the vm for a test and compile separately at the same time. Next I found out I couldn't have a bunch of tabs open while doing dev. So that was painful, and I got a desktop. The existing people who were used to how things worked said you shouldn't have a bunch of tabs open, don't do that and it works fine (oh and don't run any tests while compiling).
Then as memory use kept up even the at most 4 tabs people found they kept running out of memory and they bought a few 32 gig laptops and suddenly things worked again.
A few of us have desktops, most people are struggling with 16 gig notebooks and they started buying 32 gig notebooks for people that want them.
Where they using them for their own use out side of working hours? not usually a good idea you want to keep your personal device use separate from work equipment.