That's a mistake. You should never pay other people's costs. If the company wants to put itself in a position where work is delayed by a month for the sake of $200 then that is the company's cost to pay.
You're correct that the company should pay, but not everyone is willing to martyr their career over petty cash.
Choose your battles, as they say.
By paying the $200 you've already lost the negotiation. The work you should have done is to demand the resources to do the job the company claims it wants done.
Unfortunately this meant that we later had to fight management really hard to pay for cloud services. We lost that battle.
No, you don't. If the company won't fund the job then it doesn't get done.
I would expect that such a small amount would be approved by someone much closer to the engineers on the hierarchy.
Not to mention what a poor use of the CEOs time!
Not if it keeps him off Twitter.
High growth companies that rapidly expand as they try to penetrate the market and conduct plenty of R&D have lots of exploratory avenues and quickly-signed deals with partners that could easily result in cost saving without affecting the primary business model or the vast majority of workers.
This is different than an older company with zero growth potential trying to find more profitability by choking out their squeeze the pennies from an existing business in order to keep investors happy.
The second case was a company in which every single drop ship order from there customers had to be ordered individually from the dropshipper. Every such order had to created manually and needed managing director EMEA approval in writing.
It sounds like this is a retroactive review, not an approval process. Which should mostly get rid of any waiting for approval problems.
Also, there is no typewriter involved ;)
This resulted in engineers that would purchase their own equipment and bringing it to work to use because they couldn't wait a month for a $200 piece of equipment. It was common to have lab benches full of used equipment from ebay that engineers purchased to get their jobs done. This created an interested dynamic in the lab when it came to sharing equipment (most of it was not shared). Also, scary to know that since a lot of used equipment was being relied on, a large portion was not calibrated and could be outside spec.
There is a lot of value in creating a thrifty company culture, but sometimes it goes too far and hinders the ability for engineers to do their job. In the end, everyone is responsible for ensuring the purchase they make are wise and necessary for the success of the company.