‘The Engineering VP saw the price tag, and told us to just rent it.’ They Maliciously Complied When the Bigwigs At Their Company Started Penny Pinching

Penny pinching is usually never a good thing, am I right?

Especially when it comes to business and how it affects the employees at a business.

So, what are workers to do?

All you can do is maliciously comply!

Take a look at this story from Reddit, we think you’ll enjoy it!

Back in the days when 33.6kbps modems were hot, I worked for the engineering department of a growing company.

This company had started small. It was privately owned, and the VPs had all put in a portion of their own money to start the company. By this time in the story, they were finally making a respectable 30-40 million a year in profits.

But they still acted like a small company. Penny pinching.

Our engineering department was designing circuit boards with embedded computer systems. And to program these, instead of soldering the microcomputer to the board, we would solder on a microcontroller socket, and then plug in an “In Circuit Emulator” that would pretend it was a microcontroller, and allow the programmer to create the required program.

This In Circuit Emulator, or ICE, was made by Hitachi. It plugged into a free PCI slot on your PC, and had a ribbon cable that would attach to the specialized microcontroller die that plugged into the socket.

It was a mess. It gave our tiny IT department headaches. And it cost $15,000. And it was an absolute necessity for most of our most popular product lines. And there was only one of them.

And we were renting it. It cost $4,000 a month.

The first month we had it, our CTO and Marketing VP planned our whole new product line around this family of microcontrollers.

So, at the end of the month, us engineers ask management to buy this for us. Since we would be using it for a while.

The Engineering VP saw the price tag, and told us to just rent it. Surely we would be done with it soon.

Engineers, being practical, forgot about the objection and just put our noses to the wheel.

The CTO and Marketing made plans to keep us busy using this microcontroller line for a while. They pre-ordered a few million chips.

After a year, the VP of Finance asked about this recurring contract line item. They called the engineer who had originally started the contract. The engineer helpfully forwarded the approval from the Engineering VP, and his later email asking to buy it, and the VP’s reply where he demurred.

By the end of the week, this toy was ours. Along with a second one, since finance determined that product rollout was being affected by not enough access to the equipment.

Hitachi just gave us the first one. Stopped charging us, and never asked for it back. We paid $15,000 for a second one.

No one got fired or demoted. But at the next department meeting, the Engineering VP tried to tell us that we didn’t have enough money to upgrade our PCs.

That one engineer spoke up, “Would $40 thousand cover it?”

The company finally found the money.

And here’s what people had to say.

One reader talked about how cheap companies can be.

Another Reddit user said this kind of stuff is stupid and wasteful.

And one individual said this kind of behavior is also demoralizing and they made some great points.

Play expensive games, pay expensive prices.