What's the alternative? For the right professions, compute is time is money (software builds, video encoding, 3D rendering, etc.), and not all of them distribute nicely (I've never even seen distcc actually used).

The alternative is to spend less, to share resources between employees, or to rent. You can rent a much more powerful rendering farm in the cloud for less money than a full option Mac pro. Video encoding can be done in good quality and good time on a 200€ smartphone. If you push the settings to the max, you still don't need a 50k€ computer... And for software builds, just take a coffee break whenever you feel like rebuilding everything on your local machine. The company should have build servers too.