This reminds me of one of the pages that Google has internally that, very roughly, breaks down the cost of various things so you can calculate equivalencies.

As an example of what I mean (i.e., these numbers and equivalencies are completely pulled out of thin-air and I am not asserting these in any way):

  * 1 Engineer-year = $100,000
  * 25T of RAM = 1 Engineer-week
  * 1ms of display latency = 1 Engineer-year

This allows engineeers to calculate tradeoffs when they're building things and to optimize their time for business impact. E.g.: it's not worth optimizing memory usage by itself, Latency is king, Don't waste your time shaving yaks, etc etc.