What would happen is those engineers would rightly be concerned that their leadership had lost their marbles, and would quickly find new jobs elsewhere. These kinds of “fun” thought experiments don’t pan out in the real world.
EDIT: Also - client side native software and web dev are insanely different. Web/ serverside people seem to disregard this. Constantly.
I cannot parse this sentence. What does vista having its minimum requirements poorly defined have to do with being forced to develop on underpowered hardware?
If my boss says “we are giving you a worse machine because we think that will make you write better code” I am out of there. There are plenty of ways to emulate weaker hardware and do performance testing and to make it a development priority that don’t involve intentionally hamstringing your engineers.
You’re all over the place. Please explain why you think using underpowered hardware is the only legitimate way to write software that works on that hardware.
In particular I often fight the slowest machine leaving the office. That should stay for a long time, set aside for testing.
Testing only in a VM on a beefy dev box leads to terribly performing software on customer machines. There's a multitude of performance problems that only come up when a system starts paging to disk, a machine has a HDD, or a CPU gets maxed out. These issues will be completely occulted on a dev machine with tons of RAM, 16 cores, and an NVMe disk.
Far too many developers have the beefy dev box with no requirements to test on more prosaic configurations. Even limiting a VM's CPU and memory isn't a good environment for performance testing because it's still faster than actual low end hardware.
Basically: An end-user has computer with 4GB of DDR3. Devs for <software> wrote for and tested on a machine with 64GB of DDR5. <Software> ends up running like shit on end-user's computer.
It isn't the end-user's problem that the software runs like shit, because the devs programmed to an unrealistic common denominator. The end-user is going to find <software> that doesn't run like shit on his computer, and the devs only have themselves to blame for losing a customer because they were so out of tune with reality.
It may not be their fault but it almost certainly is their problem…
I have to say, I appreciate the insane expertise browser engine developers have in making JS and layouting run fast.