I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!"
TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation.
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterproductive. But if you look at some of the top examples the article gives, nearly every one can have a flip side:
1."Tool penny pinching" - totally agree, having a good set of tools for engineers is critically important. At the same time, I've seen companies do an audit where they found lots of expensive SaaS products got little use or were not worth it. It's fair to say that individual tools should have to justify their costs in terms of productivity improvements or time savings.
2. Hardware savings - Unlike this article, I recall reading another good example of a midsize software company I believe where the engineers were just able to make a case that better hardware would save x hours per developer per year. It was an easy argument to management so they upgraded. That's much better than "We want the fastest laptop, just trust us!"
3. "Infrastructure Sabotage" - this is the one that I think annoyed me the most, because I've seen cloud costs explode where hardly anyone had a good grasp on where that money was going.
Yes, there is a reason "penny wise and pound foolish" is a well known saying. But this article is just heavy on the feels without ever making good, analytical arguments.