I disagree with the blanket statement that "spending 10x more on hardware will give you roughly 10x more value", especially in the context of this article. You

I disagree with the blanket statement that "spending 10x more on hardware will give you roughly 10x more value", especially in the context of this article. You only receive 10x value increase IF your software will scale to use the better/more hardware AND your software is rate-limited by hardware AND you receive value based on the speed of the software. Those are pretty big predicates. Of course, there are sensible ranges and strawman ranges. That's true for programming talent, too. But the article wasn't advocating for hiring more people. The idea of the article is that footprint matters and needs to be reexamined periodically. This is true for programmers (sadly) as well as hardware. "Hardware is cheap" is not a sustainable growth substitute for efficient solutions. We see the same thing with outsourcing, where a company discovers that ten programmers for the price of one does not always yield the desired outcome (faster, cheaper, better). Because of course everyone wants to be in a position to use your math (10x more on hardware == 10x more value), but you can not be confident of that unless you know that your solution has a hardware bottleneck. And you don't know that until you drain the swamp (or stress test extensively).