TBH, I hate articles like this, not because I disagree with the general thesis, but because they present things in a way that is so one-sided that it is either ignorant or willfully blind to the other side of the equation.

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that cost cutting or being stingy with resources can be counterproductive. But if you look at some of the top examples the article gives, nearly every one can have a flip side:

1."Tool penny pinching" - totally agree, having a good set of tools for engineers is critically important. At the same time, I've seen companies do an audit where they found lots of expensive SaaS products got little use or were not worth it. It's fair to say that individual tools should have to justify their costs in terms of productivity improvements or time savings.

2. Hardware savings - Unlike this article, I recall reading another good example of a midsize software company I believe where the engineers were just able to make a case that better hardware would save x hours per developer per year. It was an easy argument to management so they upgraded. That's much better than "We want the fastest laptop, just trust us!"

3. "Infrastructure Sabotage" - this is the one that I think annoyed me the most, because I've seen cloud costs explode where hardly anyone had a good grasp on where that money was going.

Yes, there is a reason "penny wise and pound foolish" is a well known saying. But this article is just heavy on the feels without ever making good, analytical arguments.

I agree with the thesis in general but this point is not resonating strongly with me.

Conferences are expensive.

AWS reinvent for example requires you to spend 2000 dollars on a conference ticket and travel to Las Vegas and pay for expensive hotels etc.

Most of the content from the sessions and talks there is posted online on YouTube ... in recent memory they posted them online within a day (full credit to them).

The added benefit of attending conferences in person is very hard to justify IMO. Yes there is networking and yes there are some hands on workshops etc.

Instead of the justification offered in the blog post ... I would say, sponsoring your employees' visits to conferences shows that you treat them well, care about their personal learning and growth, and inturn motivates them to look for synergies between their interests and work. They might end up learning that technique from a free youtube video anyway, but only the motivated ones care about applying it at work.

The next week there were 40 staff queuing for coffee at every cafe within a 10 minute walk. Coffee breaks went from 3-4 minutes (walk to kitchen on your floor, press 'latte', walk to desk) to a minimum of 45 minutes (elevator to ground floor, walk to cafe, queue with everyone else, wait with everyone else, elevator back up). These were staff on high six figure salaries.

Definitely the Frupidiest decision I have ever seen.

I agree with the general concept, but the example in the article are so extremely exaggerated that it’s hard to take the article seriously. A $15 tool that would save hundreds of hours of tasks? A conference visit that would save millions? Anyone who has had to approve, review, or audit expenditures knows it’s not that simple.

I was involved with a company that got a lot of funding during the zero interest rate era and adopted this idea that it was self-defeating to scrutinize software and hardware purchases. When the money stopped flowing they finally started reviewing software and hardware expenditures and found, unsurprisingly, a massive amount of unnecessary spending.

In the real world it’s almost never a $15 tool that saves hundreds of hours (like this article used as an example). Instead, it was countless SaaS platforms with per-seat licensing fees that added up huge recurring bills.

There was a recurring theme where some department would say they needed some SaaS tool, so it got approved. Then they would add everyone in the department and many people outside so they could share and access the links. Every time someone needed access, they’d add another seat for that person. Countless cases of teams spending $49/month times 50 seats times multiple years for a tool that nobody could even recall using recently. Multiply this by dozens of tools, some of which were very expensive, and the amount spent on unused SaaS seats could have easily funded multiple extra engineering teams.

So while I think it’s frustrating to have to petition to get purchases made, I’ve also seen the madness that happened when it’s a free for all. Gone are the days when someone would expense a $50 software tool and use it for years. Now it’s a SaaS with a recurring subscription that has viral tricks to get everyone who uses it to count as an extra seat for monthly fees.

Conferences are another area that can become a boondoggle very quickly. Don’t even get me started on the “conferences” that were actually just week long getaways with JavaScript influencers at some resort somewhere, with a couple presentations included so you could get your company to cover it.

The answer to all these questions is that things that are measurable will always be prioritised over things that are not easily measured. And the more mature the enterprise, the more the measurable has been squeezed to the detriment of the immeasurable.

IT hardware spend it very easily measured, but the time wasted and morale hit you get working on a shitty laptop is very hard to measure.

Anything that is measurable, you just turn a knob and announce 10% savings: well done you! enjoy your promotion -- the intangible negative externalities of your recklessness will rarely be considered or even known by the person whose job it is to review your performance.

Now I have a strong belief that paying people whose only job is to save on costs is a bad move: they will conclude that the best way to save on costs is to shut down the company. Technically correct!

You need to approve the vendor, check if there no minimum amount of seats, then figure out that even for a simple sso they have a different plan which is 50 usd / month

And with laptops, I get the point to some extent, nobody says buy an engineer a 2 core 8gb ram machine, but try speccing up a Mac and see how deep the apple tax is on ram and storage, especially if you're non US.

I would propose, as always, things are about context and compromises.

Business travel in general seems to be rich hunting grounds for frupidity, because the bean counters aren't the ones traveling. The good old "can't expense anything without a receipt" policy, for example, ensures people will take expensive taxis (with receipts!) instead of tapping on and off public transport.

Highest end dev laptops available. Dev replicas of prod infra. Separate high spec servers for almost everything. Highly automated deep testing pipelines. Enterprise grade Internet.

We also shared how to build 2x-10x faster github actions runners: https://words.strongcompute.com/p/maximising-github-actions-...

Dev time is precious.

Other focus is Management by Context: Solid physical and tech environment. Clear goals of next feature with real testing in front of users. Dive into details where something isn't working, otherwise hands off.

[1] https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks

The hard thing is knowing which ones are which. You can't see the benefit in advance.

A lot of things aren't worth paying for. A lot of software licenses go completely unused. A lot of conference attendees hang out with friends and learn nothing useful. A lot of modern hardware is spent editing CSS files.

The engineers exaggerate and say everything is useful because they don't want to lose any perks. The accountants exaggerate the other direction because their job is to protect cash flow and they have no clue what's useful.

Budget makers are often stuck in the middle: too far up to know what's practically useful but close enough that they know they need to make some investment.

A company I worked at had an IT budget of 5000 euro for 120 people (90% SWE). The logic was: if we buy a commercial solution for time tracking our IT budget will double. Instead super senior engineer Y is maintaining his "free" in-house solution with half the feature set.

All of these problems are about not taking the cost of expensive engineering time and energy into account in a rational way.

This has so many angles to it. You can't just generalize cloud costs. You can stop using bloated JS frameworks to make up for the inflated application costs. You can switch to OVH or Hetzner or better yet, on-prem. It's like you are asking everyone to just give in to horrible tactics of AWS

I'd add 'sending work staff on long flights in economy expecting them to hit the ground running and work straight away' but I have sympathies with companies facing 30%+ rises in travel costs.

This was incredibly timesaving for all those cases where you need a cable or a USB stick or a book or some parts off Digikey or a small software license. Because having a meeting about whether or not something is necessary would easily have consumed more than £100 of time.

It helped that it was a small office of less than ten people and everyone could physically see everyone else's desk.

It’s not too different to a design doc. Design doc proposes a solution and details the investment needed to bring it into existence.

Main difference is the additional need to communicate why there is a problem - but most design docs restate this at the top anyway.

Maybe making a case for a change will show the org some previously untracked info, eg. time wasted. And maybe that was not known previously and surfacing it leads to rapid change. But be wary because maybe making your case will cause you to learn things you didn’t know. You might make your case and learn there are reasons for the frugality that you weren’t privy to and now are. But going through the process will either way better align your priorities to the org’s and vice versa.

But also, I spent almost 2 years developing with 8GB of RAM. Constraints can help you develop and understand the problems better. At various times frustrating for sure.

I’ve never understood why companies don’t ask what laptop you want instead of shoving one at you. You’re hired for your expertise and then almost instantly given a hammer when you work with wrenches.

If you didn't have to look that up then chances are you've been somewhere that's frupid. :D

Maybe I’m just crotchety but something about blogging your AI crud to the world really pisses me off. Feels… disrespectful, almost?

Now obviously it'll vary by amount, but mostly we don't overthink it. We need x, we get x. Often we then use x, but occasionally it turns out we didn't need it. It's easy to look around the office and see a bunch of things we bought, but never used.

The point is, we can do this because it's basically "our" money. We aren't beholden to shareholders or (worse) an electorate.

We're seeing the flip-side of this in govt now. USaid is "on hold" because of wasteful spending. Yay, we dont won't waste. But that's like killing a business completely because you don't like the pens they chose.

Of course there's waste. It's impossible to spend money without it. Yes, it should be a small %. Yes not every purchase benefits everyone. But just killing it doesn't kill waste, it kills people. Lots of political points are earned because some payment in there is wasteful. No mention of the vaccine studies that are now useless, or the people half-way through a study who may be getting adverse effects (now with no support.)

In a business we call it Frupid. In politics it makes for z good sound bite.