My reactionary response would be something like "Dude, it's 2016. Eclipse, Chrome, and WebLogic max me out" (Yes, WebLogic, that says it all.)
Should I just leave this place ASAP, or has anyone had success in lobbying their company for better hardware? If so, can you give me some tips on how to pull it off? Your tax dollars are involved!
"With a 16GB machine, it takes my test suite 5 minutes to run. With 4GB, that suite runs in 20 minutes. I need to run it on average, 10 times a day. So by giving me the 4GB machine, you're having me sit idle for an unnecessary 15 minutes, 10 times a day. So that's 2.5 hours per day that you're paying me to spin around in my chair and surf HackerNews. That's X wasted dollars every day, which is significantly more than the cost of the upgrade from 4GB to 16GB. So you'll save money by giving me a faster machine".
If there's a way to speak dollars-and-cents to the bureaucrats in your org, then there's a better chance of them approving your request.
Things will not get better, as management has costs to cut. Your work equipment is one of those costs. If it was up to them, you'd be shoveling with 3 spoons instead of a shovel, since "it works for most", meaning "we only assign shovels on a 1-1 basis so that we wouldn't need to spend bigger amount now." What are your salary raise prospects at such a company?
That being said, 4GB is stupidly low for a development machine and that should be alarming for the development team (6GB is not much an improvement).
I would argue the "works fine for most developers" point. What works now (the current state) is certainly not going to last. 4GB is already too low and it is only going to get more difficult as the requirements increase (bloat is a constant).
The conversation should be "what is the practical life of this hardware and do we intend to upgrade when it runs out." You should think about performance hits (in the people sense, not hardware sense) if these environments are abandoned by your developers. All hardware purchases have an effective life and what you've described is a purchase which will barely last another 12 months, imho.
I don't even know where I'd begin to petition for a change. This was mostly just my way of ranting somewhere I'd get support, since no one made a peep on the internal comment I posted. I don't think most developers are fine with the 4GB situation. Those that are don't matter, and the others have likely just been beaten into submission or don't want to be seen as fussy.
Gallup does surveys for businesses and one of the questions they ask is "Do you have the right equipment to do your job".
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/26773/why-employees-ne...
If your workstation is slow, or you have to deal with OOM issues, and can't get your work done, that is something that needs addressed not by guessing, but my management doing their job and providing you with the right equipment from the start.
If the company isn't willing to provide you the right equipment based on what the employees think and not just on what one person says based on hearsay, than I'd question if that is a good place to work.
I really wanted to ask if I could donate my old netbook and remote into that.
Unless you're offshore and your wasted time is not as valuable, that's a poor VDI use case that doesn't make sense
Fight it with vendor recommendations.
http://blogs.vmware.com/consulting/tag/vmware-view-storage
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/Server-Storage-Sizing-G...
Maybe link this comments thread in your intranet post, a community like HN expressing sane norms might help your case.
But yeah you need twice that RAM, minimum.
I used to have to upgrade my own machines. For years. Monitors and RAM. I haven't had a place that gave me anything less than 16G for years now, though.
It works for me to develop on though. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
But then you wouldn't be running Eclipse, Chrome and WebLogic locally on them, so that's probably not the case? And even Chrome alone can easily eat more than 4 GB, so that's kinda laughable for any kind of dev work.