> more expensive engineers don't use more expensive computers
They don't? If you give your best engineers substandard hardware to work on, you're going to get worse output from them compared to if you give them more expensive computers to work with.
Not completely true. Giving developers hardware that is too beefy is the main reason why so much software breaks down when run on users' machines, which are generally old, on spotty Internet connections, and RAM-starved. Devs just don't need to think about performance unless it's really asymptotically bad, while the users bear the full brunt of inefficiencies.
I agree, but good computers are so comparatively cheap and engineers so expensive that this logic applies to (nearly?) every one of your engineers, not just the most expensive ones.
They don't? If you give your best engineers substandard hardware to work on, you're going to get worse output from them compared to if you give them more expensive computers to work with.