>I’ve basically never heard a business leader say that they were going to set a bunch of money on fire because it made them feel good.

Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay.

We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollars (AWS charges) on rebranding all our photos. We operate in a captive market, if you want to operate in our market you are required to subscribe to our service, and if you aren't in our market you can't subscribe. Branding at the end of the day drives 0 sales.

Heck, reminds me of the time a company I was working with hired a new CTO and one of the first things he did was as "server renaming scheme" using obscure (to the US-centric staff) city names from around the world (database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland). We went from cattle naming to pet naming, for a CTO that lasted ~6 months.

In my experience company leadership is not quite as thrifty as this article likes to think they are.

[delayed]

> database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland

consider me officially triggered

To be fair leaders usually don't say that, they say a whole lot of nothing that means "We're gonna set money on fire because it makes me feel good."

Or more accurately, "Because this is good for my career."