"If the company provided you hardware that is subpar, you shouldn’t spend your own money".
Hard disagree. I've always supplemented or augmented my tools for work. I do this because my value for efficacy and comfort exceeds that of most of my collegues and employers. I went with SDDs, multiple large high qiality monitors, decent switches keyboards, 'gaming' mice, Safari subscription (back when books were still a thing) even better IDE's long before a lott of these became popular and prices commoditized.
If tools are holding you back, that might prompt you to look for a different employer, but why waste your own time just to 'retaliate' with holding back?
Holding back is retaliation against employers who don't want to invest into maximum employee efficiency.
But you make a good point about that also hurting yourself. Sub-par tools hurt.
I'd agree with you to invest in tools you use to work, but not to give the return of investment to the company. Instead one should work fewer hours if those hours are more productive.
I’d do that if that benefitted me. What do I get if I deliver the project earlier? The 2 weeks that I delivered it earlier because I already had root in my machine vs waiting for IT, do I get to take those as vacation, or I’ll just be assigned a new project?
If you are investing in increasing your output, only do so if you are going to reap some benefits too.
To me the driver is not increasing output. It is a mental satisfaction of spending my working time with tools I enjoy using rather than spending totally avoidable mental energy and frustration on coping with already solved limitations.
Hard disagree. I've always supplemented or augmented my tools for work. I do this because my value for efficacy and comfort exceeds that of most of my collegues and employers. I went with SDDs, multiple large high qiality monitors, decent switches keyboards, 'gaming' mice, Safari subscription (back when books were still a thing) even better IDE's long before a lott of these became popular and prices commoditized.
If tools are holding you back, that might prompt you to look for a different employer, but why waste your own time just to 'retaliate' with holding back?