I used to work at Yahoo (a decade ago). At the time <i>every</i> hardware purchase went through a review committee in Sunnyvale. Even for e.g. Europe - I worked out of the European head office in London.<p>That committee included one of the founders (I can&#x27;t for the life of me remember if it was Yang or Filo). I had to buy $4k worth of hardware once and they spent 20 minutes grilling me about load data etc. from the current server.<p>It just baffled me at the time that a multi-billion dollar company saw it as worthwhile for one of its founders to spend 20 minutes discussing a $4k purchase.<p>Not to mention the signal value about how little they trusted the judgement of their engineering team.<p>I concluded that it basically was about two things:<p>1) to keep said person away from more important decision, at the cost of annoying a lot of other people. 2) as an intentional barrier to make people think twice about asking for more. To #2 on one hand I appreciate fiscal responsibility, but at the same time I&#x27;ve seen too often how making people overly stingy often wastes huge amount of resources trying to engineer around something that could be solved for a tenth of the cost by throwing more hardware at it.