I really disagree with this article. There's very few real world cases where a problem lands on a dev team's plate that could otherwise easily be solved by throwing hardware at it. In cases where it is possible, it's usually an exotic hardware change. For example, moving from local disks to a SAN or SSDs, which is not to be taken as a hardware swap. If you have an app that's CPU bound and you go from a single core 3gz to a quad core, any dev will tell you that it won't ever get close to 4x faster unless it was very carefully developed for multiple cores in the first place.

Consider one of the most common cases. A web application that starts to bog down quickly when it reaches a certain threshold. Let's assume it's not as simple as the network bandwidth (I *wish* my customer's bandwidth doubled every year for the same price!). You've got 200 visitors and they're all responsive, but when you get 300 it's twice as slow, and when you get 350 it's 3 times as slow. Go ahead and replace the servers with double the CPU & RAM, and the next step up of disk tech (raid 5 SCSI to RAID 10 SAS for example) and see if you can suddenly support 400 users.

Part of the developer's skill set, and the reason they are expensive, is engineering and architecture. Consider the mechanical engineering world. Humans have been doing that for a lot longer than programming, so we have a better understanding of a solution that is plain stupid. If a device is underperforming, can you skip talking to an engineer and solve it by swapping out the engine for one twice as big? Have you ever talked to an engineer who said, "yeah, just double the power and that won't affect anything else!" Maybe you've got a steel rod that keeps breaking, and the actual solution is to make a slightly bigger rod out of titanium. But if that actually works, it just means the engineering wasn't done right in the first place. This is how engineering disasters happen.

And finally, good programmers are not dumb. If a problem lands on their desk that can be fixed with a few thousand dollars worth of hardware, they're going to consider it after they've billed that much time. Chances are they've got better things to do because their skills can be better used elsewhere.