Some places are so inelastic that developers get hand-me-down laptops from sales people who couldn't sell, or when they buy a new machine from Dell they get one with two cores.
So.... they pay you a salary right? So long as they don't prevent it... you can take some of the money your company allocates to salary, and reallocate it to buying a few cheap VMs.
I was working as an enumerator for the U.S. Census in the year 2000 and one of the people on my team realized that for 2 hours worth of pay she could buy office supplies that would save us all (and the government) 60 hours worth of work.
She was stressed because there wasn't any official channel for us to buy office supplies other than the stuff they sent us.
I told her to buy the office supplies and say that she worked another 2 hours; this was breaking the rules but this did not strike me as at all unethical.
Now, not long after the 2008 crunch I was getting pissed about how long builds took on my cheap laptop (on which I was running both the client and server sides of a complex app).
Getting a better machine from management was out of the question, but I liked other aspects of the job, and 2009 wasn't the best time to go job seeking. So I bought myself a top end desktop computer and three inexpensive monitors.
When I left that company they wanted to buy the machine off me so as to keep all the proprietary code and data on it, but as things worked out, the value of my own proprietary code and data on that machine was worth a lot to me so I kept it, and fortunately things never went to court.
This type of decision has risks (for instance, you don't want to be the guy who loses a machine with social security numbers on it and forces his employer to pay for credit monitoring for 70,000 people) but it can be the right thing to do sometimes.
I am surprised that they let you use your own machine. I am also surprised that they didn't get the code and data from you (or take you to court), as most employment contracts state that all work done by the employee is considered company property.
you're profitsharing, right? so if you go around the company's self limiting policies, and make more profit by using your salary... then it's a net win to you.
Some places are so inelastic that developers get hand-me-down laptops from sales people who couldn't sell, or when they buy a new machine from Dell they get one with two cores.