In my first job, management purposely prohibited developers from using really powerful machines because we needed to make the software faster. The problem was it was hard to make the software faster because it was so slow to run, measure, and verify changes.

Those managers were eventually all let go and one of the first things new management did was buy us the most powerful machines they could find and institute performance regression tests that rachetted down. Each change could only keep the existing performance or make it faster. And changes that made it faster set the new watermark. Regressions required management approval.

After performance having been unimproved for a year, it was largely resolved in 6 months.

Since then I’ve been a believer that you give your developers nearly the fastest platform money can buy but then have automated, gatekeeping tests for your lowest target platform, with spot checking to make sure your tests reflect actual user experienced performance on that platform.