I"m not sure what "budget" you're referring to

Apple didn't pay well for most of its life, until well after iPhone/iPad success

It was not like "FAANG salaries", which started around 2011, by my reckoning because Facebook didn't agree to the "Steve Jobs collusion" with Google/Intel/Pixar (ironically!)

This is very well documented

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Steve Jobs e-mails Eric Schmidt (2007) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699873

Steve mostly realized the good engineers want to work with other good engineers, no matter what they are paid

He didn't actually give people "budget"

I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.

A budget is also time, resources, and latitude. Steve Jobs’ “Figure it out” was “I’ve given you a task, now go do what’s necessary to get it done”. This is what the post you’re responding to is referencing: the client is asking for something to get done but is not providing the resources required.

As a side note, engineers tend to be bad at couching conversations in these terms - nothing is impossible*, things just cost more or less, and that’s a decision for the money people to make.

* yes yes caveat caveat

When I think of “budget” in this context, I’m thinking about what is available to the engineers in terms of tools, resources, and time.

Where I work, it doesn’t really matter what I’m paid, we don’t have a budget to go get what we need. If I think a certain tool would help get a job done faster, too bad, I have to cobble together what I can with the tools I’ve been provided. If I think something will take a year, too bad, it’s due in a month and we’ll have an hour long meeting every day to ask why it isn’t done yet.

In this context, employee pay is largely irrelevant.

I'm not sure this makes the idea of him saying "just figure it out" any more applicable to the rest of us (which is what the parent comment was responding to). You've pointed out that he was _unsuccessful_ for a number of decades before hitting the jackpot, and I'm dubious that the only reason he was more successful than everyone else in the long run was due to the rest of the industry just not trying hard enough. That means it was some combination of his specific skills or circumstances beyond his control, and either way, it's not really super actionable advice to "just figure it out (and either be uniquely talented or extremely lucky)".

I was referring to project budget, not pay.

I had a coworker who wanted a BMW more than anything. Typical young Indian male aspiration of that era (everyone had a BMW as their wallpaper).

He got the money together to buy one. Or thought he did. Forgot about insurance, being a young male and little driving history. Doubled his payments.

Also he was a terrible driver. The expensive thing about BMWs is not the car it’s repairs. Which is also why the insurance is so high. He wrecked that thing three times. He probably could have gotten his family into a better house for the amount of money he burned on that car. So foolish.

Customers live out this sort of drama all the time. They need a good used car but they want something that’ll bankrupt them because they have an image in their head. Either a dream or a status symbol.

Gordon Ramsay did a whole TV series about restaurateurs with the same mental block. They want to be successful but they don’t want to pay their dues and pretend instead.