My employer is considered capping all engineers at $200 or $500/mo of token spend depending on level

Indeed, but I also think structural considerations must be done at the company level on the work model overall

It's also kind of odd because even a junior engineer has to cost a company around 10 grand a month in salary, taxes, and other costs. So if the company thinks it makes you 10% more effective it seems like it should be an easy choice. So either the companies are shooting themselves in the foot limiting spending or they aren't seeing the productivity boost.

Maybe a dumb question, but what are you doing/seeing others do that uses that many tokens? I find myself pressing the weekly caps on the $20/month plan only when I'm really having the LLMs go wild with the Xtra high effort on the newest/biggest models on abstract problems or where I don't really understand the problem well. (E.g. improving ML models, planning creative molecule synthesis pipelines, identifying subtle performance problems etc) Generic CRUD/Config stuff I do for work (and assume most software jobs entail? Maybe not correct) doesn't use a significant amount of tokens.

On business side orgs are now absorbing costs of tokens to their own local budgets...so the calculus soon will be:1 extra engineer or extra token spend for existing ones. Tbh, when the productivity payoff becomes more obvious I would happily take the latter.