It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.
Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.
Except there was photoshop involved.
And a solitary 15" monitor.
And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).
After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
The Financial Industry is unfortunately plagued with such issues though. I had to survive with the exact thing until I requested Admin access and updated my boxes myself. Dropbox definitely has it right though with the whole dream machine idea. Kudos to them.
