we have on-prem with heavy spikes (our batch workload can utilize the 20TB of memory in the cluster easily) and we just don't care much and add 10% every year to the hardware requested. Compared to employing people or paying other vendors (relational databases with many TB-sized tables...) this is just irrelevant.
Sadly devs are incentivized by that and going towards the cloud might be a fun story. Given the environment I hope they scrap the effort sooner rather than later, buy some Oxide systems for the people who need to iterate faster than the usual process of getting a VM and replace/reuse the 10% of the company occupied with the cloud (mind you: no real workload runs there yet...) to actually improve local processes...
Somewhat unrelated, but you just tied wasteful software design to high it salaries, and also suggest a reason why Russian programmers might also seem to on the whole be far more effective than we are
I wonder if msft simply cut dev salaries by 50% in the 90s, would it have had any measurable effect on windows quality by today