[BlandDuck]

Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.

For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.

XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

[Retric]

The breakeven rate on developer hardware is based on the value a company extracts not their salary. Someone making X$/year directly has a great deal of overhead in terms of office space and managers etc, and above that the company only employees them because the company gains even more value.

Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.

Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.