If you are going to pay big bucks to a programmer, you want one that does a little algorithm analysis before s/he puts fingers to keyboard, same with memory usage. I saw a major project go down the tubes because the architect thought that it scaled limitlessly but really it scaled n^2. Ain't good for a transaction protocol.

If you need to scale, you need to have a good architectural path from the beginning. I've talked to too many companies whose growth is constrained by the need to re implement from the ground up, right in the middle of the hockey stick growth. What I mean is a little bit of thought at the beginning, not months of agonizing or 9 tons of frameworks. Given that, you can throw hardware at it and let your programmers add value.