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The corollary is that it's only the budget that is tracked that anyone cares about.

Often your salary is not on that budget, so if it takes you twice as long but you don't have to buy/hire/use AWS, winner.

As someone who once spent two months reworking a system because a 4GB Oracle instance was okay, but 8GB was verboten, I agree.

Salary does not need to be on the budget because it is the same whether you work 40hrs per week or 80.