I work with 135,000 of my co-workers and we all get rather slow, outdated, Windows 7 boxes with 2GB of ram. It's the standard config regardless of what you do. Supposedly it's much cheaper to manage for the IT dept than if we got our own stuff individually and I imagine it's much cheaper to buy 50,000 of the same computer from Dell than order a whole bunch of variety.
Seeing as developers are a small percentage of the total workforce, even if all of them complained, it would be drowned out by the mass of people who have computers good enough for their jobs. The cost of having to deal with ordering and supporting different computers (beyond just laptop versus desktop) is not 0. The quantifiable gain from having some people have better computers is very difficult to calculate. Thus, it's easy to just give developers the slow boxes and listen to them complain.
Related, I've previously emailed to ask why my company has a policy that every PC must be shutdown every night even though it can take up to 8 minutes to start up in the morning (we have a lot of required anti-viri/spam/malware and disk scanners that run). I was told that the company expects us to not be fully efficient all the time, go get some coffee while your computer boots. Also, different budgets cover PC cost versus payroll.
"I was told that the company expects us to not be fully efficient all the time, go get some coffee while your computer boots."
Who told you that? Well, actually, it doesn't much matter to me, but if you were told that by IT, you may discover that forwarding that email up to management will have exciting and entertaining consequences. As long as you don't mind making an enemy or two.
On a more practical note, some machines can be set to turn on at a certain time, via BIOS settings, or hardware that takes advantage of Wake-On-LAN or other such things. If you're really personally bothered, you may be able to take advantage of that. You may also want to consider trying to simply suspend the machine. It'll mostly look and be off, but should come up more quickly... if it works.
Our IT is some low paid people answering the phones in a foreign land. They don't much care if I complain. The IT managers higher up who make the decisions aren't any better at listening to employee complaints. Their motivation appears to be save as much money (that they decide to count) as possible. Their impact to costs outside of the IT budget aren't high on their priority list.
My laptop gets locked in a cabinet at night, I just suspend it and everything appears to be off. If you have a desktop, that's not necessarily possible, and the Dell's we have usually have some blink'en lights still going when the machine is asleep.
BIOSes are generally locked down so employees can't change them. Laptops have mandated full disk encryption that uses the MBR in special ways, so dual booting is not possible.
I actually was told once that I had left my 21" CRT on overnight. The little stand-by light was still on when I left one day. That's a big no-no. There's somewhat random checks for these types of things. Fun, eh?
Thankfully, the work I'm doing is interesting and the pay's good. The politics and budget antics are rather annoying but I get the impression that's the way the world works at large companies. Maybe I'm wrong?
Seeing as developers are a small percentage of the total workforce, even if all of them complained, it would be drowned out by the mass of people who have computers good enough for their jobs. The cost of having to deal with ordering and supporting different computers (beyond just laptop versus desktop) is not 0. The quantifiable gain from having some people have better computers is very difficult to calculate. Thus, it's easy to just give developers the slow boxes and listen to them complain.
Related, I've previously emailed to ask why my company has a policy that every PC must be shutdown every night even though it can take up to 8 minutes to start up in the morning (we have a lot of required anti-viri/spam/malware and disk scanners that run). I was told that the company expects us to not be fully efficient all the time, go get some coffee while your computer boots. Also, different budgets cover PC cost versus payroll.