A good manager knows that an employee is productive whenever they're comfortable. With that said, I agree. This is an excuse for upper management and C-suite executives to make employee-hostile policies.

Instead of buying developers a powerful workstation and letting them do install their own software and create workflows that they’re comfortable with, they can be handed a Chromebook and told to start producing code like the code monkey they're seen as.

The "benefits" will be touted as:

• Cheaper hardware costs.
  Developers don't need a powerful machine to run tooling or compile software, and cloud IDEs and build servers are pay-as-used. The reasoning would be: paying $300 for a Chromebook and $25 monthly is cheaper than $1200 for a new machine every few years.

• Reduced support burden.
  If developers don't need to install their own software, they won't need to submit requests to IT.

• Infrastructure security.
  Less software is less surface area. Since all the developer's software is hosted in the cloud, their computers don't need to run anything but a VPN, web browser, and restricted user permissions.

• "Productivity"
  Browsing Lemmy on company time? Not anymore! Your development machines are distraction-free, and we made sure of that with our root CA and enterprise policy settings.