Small companies and large companies have entirely different time/money tradeoffs and it can be hard to make the transition. At my previous employer it was fine

Small companies and large companies have entirely different time/money tradeoffs and it can be hard to make the transition. At my previous employer it was fine to spend a week making something work by cobbling together existing projects with some glue code. It was fun and I learned a lot. So when I started this job (working with large companies) helping out with a co-worker's task I started trying to solve a particular problem the skinflint way, ok we can repurpose this box here to serve a filesystem while the other box is down for the vendor to swap the firmware and then... My co worker (rightly) pre-empted me and recommended $20,000 of SAN equipment to replace the problematic device. Neither way is better in the absolute, it's a question of what variable you're optimizing for.