Frugality is a virtue. The art of doing more with less, making sharp trade-offs, and keeping waste at bay so the good stuff – innovation, growth, maybe even a little joy – has room to thrive. Any engineer worth their salt knows the power of an elegant, efficient solution. A few well-placed optimizations can turn a sluggish system into a rocket.
But frugality has a dark twin – a reckless, shortsighted impostor that mistakes cost-cutting for efficiency and penny-pinching for wisdom. Enter frupidity, or stupid frugality – the obsessive drive to save money in ways that ultimately cost far more in lost productivity, morale, and sanity. It’s the engineering equivalent of “optimizing” a car by removing the brakes to improve gas mileage.
The Many Faces of Frupidity in Engineering
Frupidity thrives in large orgs, where budgets are tight, bureaucracies dense, and someone, somewhere, is always trying to impress a spreadsheet. The best part? It usually masquerades as good stewardship.
Tool Penny-Pinching
“Why are we spending $15 a month per seat on this tool?” a manager asks. A fair question – except no one factors in that without it, engineers will burn hundreds of hours manually wrestling with tasks that a good automation could have handled in minutes. Multiply that by a hundred devs, and suddenly that “savings” is bleeding the company dry.
Hardware Stinginess
“No reason to buy high-end laptops when these entry-level machines get the job done.” Sure – if your definition of ‘getting the job done’ includes waiting five minutes for each build to compile. Those little delays don’t show up in the budget, but they pile up in engineers’ heads like a slow poison, turning momentum into molasses.
Infrastructure Sabotage
Cutting cloud costs by downgrading instances or consolidating databases into a single underpowered behemoth? Brilliant. Until query performance plummets and every engineer waits an extra five seconds per request, day in, day out. That’s not saving – it’s death by a thousand cuts.
Travel Masochism
Slashing travel budgets? Great idea – until engineers start taking three-hop flights with overnight layovers instead of direct ones. Productivity nosedives. Morale craters. Someone finally realizes the cost of these savings is burning more money than the travel budget ever did.
Conference Austerity
Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly.
The True Cost of Frupidity
The worst
29 Comments
albert_e
> Conference Austerity
> Conferences get nuked because someone upstairs sees them as a “nice to have.” The irony? That conference could’ve been where your engineers learned about a new technique that would’ve saved you a million bucks in infrastructure costs. Instead, they’re stuck reinventing the wheel – badly.
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.
shermantanktop
Fairly sure this term originated at Amazon.
Quarrelsome
This is why my favourite HTTP error code is 429.
If you didn't have to look that up then chances are you've been somewhere that's frupid. :D
bruce511
This article supports spending money quickly to do things right. I am fully on board with this. I've been in a small constant all my life, and we can spend money quickly, effectively, and in some cases wasteful.
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.
ggm
Guilty as charged. Running a home-brew NAS which was fun to build and a spaghetti wire mess which has to be replaced before I die, or my non tech partner loses the entire family archive.
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.
Aurornis
> except no one factors in that without it, engineers will burn hundreds of hours manually wrestling with tasks that a good automation could have handled in minutes
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.
udev4096
> Cutting cloud costs
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
ta8903
Another example: Instead of paying writers, get an LLM to turn a paragraph of information into a long article that says the same thing thrice in different ways. Readers get annoyed and take a mental note of your website as being low effort drivel, but you save a bit of money!
otar
That is a reason I only buy latest MacBooks to my team.
kevmo314
I once had a project that moved a microservice into a monolith on a larger instance type. SRE flagged that larger instance type as expensive, at $1k/mo. They really drilled in, asking "are you sure? that's a very expensive instance size". Yes, I was sure. It was replacing a service that was costing $20k/mo across a number of tiny instances.
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!
zeroCalories
I think the main problem is that measuring a lot of these things is incredibly hard. The post mentioned laptops and build time and it reminded me of a blog post[1] trying to figure out if it's worth upgrading to m3 macbooks. I encorage you to read the post yourself, but my impression is that the whole project was a huge waste of time. I suspect most attempts to measure impact will end this way. I also think a lot of the recomendations on fighting frupidity are seriously flawd. For example letting developers decide isn't any garentee that you've made the right choice, but it is a garentee that you've made an expensive one. Unless the developers are basically paying for their own tools like in a startup, this is definetly a way to piss away a companiese funds on developers that are more concerend with their own career than the profitibility of the company.
[1] https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks
bensandcastle
On board with all of this except conferences, which I still approve sometimes, but typically see poor yields here. My preference is to pay for 1:1 expert training.
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.
cellis
Was nodding along until "…consolidating databases into a single underpowered behemoth…". Nothing worse than race conditions and stale data between multiple disparate datastores. I'd rather have one database and more ram for as long as possible, tyvm. Some of the latest nights I've had debugging were at companies with mission critical data spread across multiple databases. I know it's orthogonal to the point, but this one really didn't land with me.
calmbonsai
Who the hell is routinely flying multi-hop for business travel?!
hn_throwaway_99
I feel like I could sum up this article as "give engineers everything they want, they're expensive!"
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.
dabiged
There was a large company in my city that had around 30 floors of staff and a dedicated full time contractor managing the expensive coffee machines on each floor (running dishwashers, restocking beans/milk, cleaning/servicing the machines etc). Management decided to do away with this role and get rid of the coffee machines to save 1 Full time salary + change.
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.
dave333
Then there is the opposite extravagoolish exhibited by tiny orgs you have never heard of going all in on superbowl ads.
coolgoose
People tend to forget that even in smaller companies 15 usd / month isn't that simple.
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.
owenversteeg
Don’t bother reading the article, it’s obviously LLM generated slop. ctrl-f: chatgpt, ai
Maybe I’m just crotchety but something about blogging your AI crud to the world really pisses me off. Feels… disrespectful, almost?
B-Con
A lot of things are worth paying for. A lot aren't.
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.
decimalenough
I first heard the word "frupidity" from friends at Amazon, where this seems to be quite common. Examples include prohibiting buying business class tickets, even if discounted, so people buy more expensive full fare economy tickets instead and upgrade cheaply off that with points.
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.
TimByte
The illusion of savings at the expense of productivity. Companies balk at spending $50/month on a tool that would save devs hours per week, only to burn thousands in wasted time. The worst part is that frupidity compounds. Slow laptops don't just waste time, they break flow…
pjc50
I used to work for a small consultancy which had a fantastic policy on this: there was a company credit card, and you could buy anything on it up to £100 with no advance approval – provided you made sure to send a reconciliation entry with a project code in before the end of the month, so it could be billed to the customer.
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.
tmnvdb
Another sure sign of this is custom internal tooling for things that are not business specific like time tracking and report generation.
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.
weare138
Pennywise but dollar dumb.
ukoki
Why do enterprises give developers shitty laptops? Why does it take a month to onbaord a new dev? Why does it take weeks to get a new dev tool installed that requires admin access? To get a firewall request reviewed? To get your team access to a fresh public cloud account for a new project?
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.
ccppurcell
We already have a term for this: false economy. And "cutting the brakes to increase mileage" is a terrible analogy for the examples given. There are instances of that: rolling your own encryption comes to mind. But here the better analogy would be buying cheap shoes that you have to replace much more often.
billwear
suboptimization; learned about this in engineering school 40 years ago: don't optimize the most visible parameter by itself, or you'll likely end up crashing. why do we have to freaking rename everything?
cadamsdotcom
The person with an issue should gather data and make a case for the investment. Sounds like they’re at a company where a vibes based case won’t fly, so it needs to be a business level case. These talk of resources saved/gained, ie. $$$ and time.
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.