actionherobiju

I agree with this, however companies should pay extra for the on-call hours. In our team, I am on-call once every 6 weeks. So I am "working" 9 weekends a year. As long as I am paid for 18 days, which is almost 3/4 of a month (considering 22 working days a month) ,I am cool with it. But most companies dont.

This is mostly a cost saving technique that companies quietly incorporated as if it is quite normal. Anybody who complained or criticized were branded as not being team players or being old-school. Companies found a way to get rid of operations team and had developers do the same thing without paying them extra. Well, there are some companies like Google who pay for being on-call, but the vast majority does not. So you end up having to cancel your weekend hike when you're on-call, you know, just in case something blows up. You get woken up in the middle of the night to look at an issue which could be in some part of the system you are not familiar with. But who care, this is progress, right? Right? But there is an upside to the devops model. Now developers think through the part after the code has been deployed, they care about the debuggability, about resilience, and logging correctly and all those things which they casually glossed over before. To summarize, in my opinion, being on-call is okay as long as you get paid extra for it, otherwise you're just being used. Have a good day!

Why not give devs a machine that is still fast after installing all that?

Not really. A really, really good laptop can be given for 1% of the cost of paying the developer. IMO, it would be best to provide the best tool for the trade.

Well, they are paying me a shitload of money as salary. That is what that doesn't make sense to me.

This argument is correct only if you're testing the end-user component on the dev machine. I work on backend services.

That is a valid point, but in my case I am developing backend services. I work on 3 services, so most of the time I have 3 instances of Visual Studio running. Then outlook, chrome, git extensions, Notepad++, sometimes Word/Excel/PPT/Adobe Reader. I would also have some background stuff running like Service Fabric, Docket etc. This laptop is down to a crawl under this load.