just make a spreadsheet keeping track of how many work hours are lost because of this. multiply with average pay. let him compare with the price of the license. if he can't tell which number is bigger, all hope is lost and you should move on to greener pastures.

This is not the time for "quiet quitting." This is the time for a loud, raucous quitting with a big karaoke "Take This Job and Shove It" rendition on your departure.

Ugh I feel that. We had that where I work for a while. We had to unplug the ethernet cable to use Microsoft products because there were more of us than licenses in the building, and if someone was already using it, you'd get a popup saying someone else was already signed in.

Use to work at a hospital with similar limited license software the vender was setup so if we wanted just 1 more license we had to upgrade our whole plan it would cost 10k+. So instead we just kept juggling around 15+ year old software licenses on the few computers that used these.

Film the Thunderdome event and send it to your bosses. Threaten to upload it to Youtube if they don't purchase enough profiles for everybody.

I guess neither of you guys have the critical skill called "communication"...