The sad thing: Throwing hardware at a problem was actually cheaper for a long time. You could buy that $1500 CPU and put it in your dedicated server, or spend 40 developer hours at $100 a pop. Obviously I'm talking about after the easy software side optimizations have already been put in (no amount of hardware will save you if you use the wrong data structures).

Nowadays you pay $500 a month for 4 measly CPU cores in Azure. Or "less than 1 core" for an SQL Server.

Obviously you have a lot more scalability and reliability in the cloud. But for $500 a month each we had a 16 core, 512 GB RAM machine in the datacenter (4 of them). That kind of hardware on AWS or Azure would bankrupt most companies in a year.

Well, having been on the other side, sometimes the Dev is also trying to fight the good fight whilst having to use some crap 3rd party system/library that's imposed from above because somebody at the C-suite level after suitably dinned and wined (and who knows what more, including implied or even explicit promises for the future of their career) signed a massive agreement with one of the big corporate software providers so now those of us at the coalface have to justify to money spent on that contract by using every POS from said big corporate software provider.

I mean, I might be exagerating the overtly corrupt nature of the deal (in my experience its more a mix of CTO incompetence - or being pretty much powerless at the C-Suite level because his is not the core business, hence overriden - and the high-level management trading favours using company money and more for personal rather than corporate reasons) but even competent devs that know their thing can't really do much when they have to use a bug-riddled POS massive framework from some vendor that doesn't even have proper support, for "corporate reasons".

You and me both