At a previous job, many years ago, I was appauled when I started at the hardware and software engineers were given. Low res 20” monitors that could barely produce color (good luck looking at color coded diffs). Old Dell laptops with spinning hard drives. The glacial pace of development was not surprising. The few of us in high prestiege roles were given MacBook Pros with twice as much memory and large SSDs. We proceeded to buy our own 27” high res monitors and handed the shitty monitors back to the IT dept. We also paid for our own IntelliJ licenses and refused to use the random assortment of free editors the rest of the teams were using. This started a minor revolt when the rest of the engineers saw how comparatively nice our setups were. Within a month we were informed that we needed to expense our monitors and IntelliJ licenses, and within the year the rest of engineering received the same upgrades. That was one of my first experiences with using soft power in a non-managerial leadership role.