I've often wondered how a personal company budget would work for electrical engineers.

At one place I had a $25 no question spending limit, but sank a few months trying to buy a $5k piece of test equipment because somebody thought maybe some other tool could be repurposed to work, or we used to have one of those but it's so old the bandwidth isn't useful now, or this project is really for some other cost center and I don't work for that cost center.

Turns out I get paid the same either way.