tl;dr:Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub conducted an experiment to understand tradeoffs between productivity and hardware. "When you ask a developer whether they’d prefer more or less powerful hardware, the answer is almost always more powerful hardware. More powerful hardware means less time waiting on builds - and that means more time to build the next feature or fix a bug. But even if the upfront cost is higher for higher-powered hardware, what’s the actual cost when you consider the impact on productivity?"