Christ almighty it's so hard to get one-off software purchases approved, no matter how trivial. And so easy to get approved for hiring more people at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Conferences can be interesting, too. I know people who got screwed over trying to get $100 for an unrecognized local open source conference while the PMs were all going to Aruba for Agile training because that had a certification so it was obviously a legit educational experience.
Yep, a lot of places allow for 80hrs/2wks of "training". Crazy how popular those Agile/SAFE/AWS/Azure/etc. conferences are in a destination location, meanwhile engineers asking to have time prorated for some graduate coursework is unfathomable.
