>Do companies not just double their CI workers after hearing people complain?
They do not.
I don't know if it's a matter of justifying management levels, but these discussions are often drawn out and belabored in my experience. By the time you get approval, or even worse, rejected, for asking for more compute (or whatever the ask is), you've spent way more money on the human resource time than you would ever spend on the requested resources.
This is exactly my experience with asking for more compute at work. We have to prepare loads of written justification, come up with alternatives or optimizations (which we already know won't work), etc. and in the end we choose the slow compute and reduced productivity over the bureaucracy.
And when we manage to make a proper request it ends up being rejected anyways as many other teams are asking for the same thing and "the company has limited resources". Duh.
I have never once been refused by a manager or director when I am explicitly asking for cost approval. The only kind of long and drawn out discussions are unproductive technical decision making. Example: the ask of "let's spend an extra $50,000 worth of compute on CI" is quickly approved but "let's locate the newly approved CI resource to a different data center so that we have CI in multiple DCs" solicits debates that can last weeks.
They do not.
I don't know if it's a matter of justifying management levels, but these discussions are often drawn out and belabored in my experience. By the time you get approval, or even worse, rejected, for asking for more compute (or whatever the ask is), you've spent way more money on the human resource time than you would ever spend on the requested resources.