Boeing won't care if you save the project $5k by spending a week of your time coming up with a clever workaround. The week was more important than the $5k. Same for a high level role generally. But not getting work done for a week because your boss won't approve a $500 purchase... that would be frustrating and get old fast.
I'm confused what you're getting at here. $5k/week is $260k/y (or a bit less counting vacations and holidays) and the fully-loaded cost of an engineer at a startup is typically more than that. Then consider how high opportunity costs typically are at startups, and I expect most startups would view your spending a week to avoid a one-time $5k expense to be a bad tradeoff.
I agree, most startups would view spending a week to avoid a one time $5k expense to be worth it for several years at least. That's why I'm saying the experiences are different.
If you're reading a judgment into my comment, there is none, I think doing super constrained engineering is super fun and an awesome skill to have. But I have also worked places that have the attitude of time being vastly more valuable than cash, and respect that both approaches are reasonable. Just different. But worst is when you're cash constrained to the point where even your clever workaround isn't possible to implement, even though it costs 10x less and is mission critical.
Sorry, what I'm saying above is that I don't agree with that.
Which can be a hell of a lot more than you expect. Like, don't bother spending two weeks to cut the CPU use of a service in half, if the service only uses 1k CPUs to begin with.
Saving $$ per unit and saving $$ total are so different. If all you're doing is saving $500 total, I wouldn't even care in most cases... but if you managed to use clever techniques to save $0.30 off the manufacturing cost for a toy that gets sold in the millions...
I most strongly agree with the ethical part of the article, in any event. I'm sick of companies trying to take advantage of their employees, it's just sad and gross to see it done by startups that could be better than big companies in at least this one way. But instead they take it even further somehow because their finances are far more opaque. I don't think it should be up to noblesse oblige to determine whether distribution of profits and salaries are fair, it should be assumed to be the rule even if there may be exceptions.
It's a sad day when you look at employment agreements from Intel and a shiny startup and find that Intel is more up front and transparent about how things will work and what you'll get paid.
I think the course of events in the USA in the decades since the 50s has essentially answered the question of what happens if you leave it up to the most fortunate to decide how to treat the least fortunate.
