Penny-wise and pound-foolish
I’m not sure if this expression is regional but I heard often growing up. Literally, it means something like saving a few pennies per pound without realizing the cheapest pound may be short a few ounces. But it’s a metaphor for saving a little money on some detail without realizing that what you are doing is costing much more when you consider the big picture.
You can see examples of this everywhere in software development. My favorite example is the fact that most of us work in cubicles. This saves a lot of money because our employers don’t have to build so many offices. The excuse is the cubes promote teamwork. What cubicles promote is distraction. Our work requires focus and concentration but we are subjected to the sales guys’ discussion of their golf games or the network management team’s lunch decision process.
Another example is development systems. I worked a contract a while back where the company had a process all set up for providing computers to new employees. The problem was that the same process did not apply to contractors. They needed me to “hit the ground running” but I was given some cast-off computer and had to go through three keyboards to find one that worked properly. Then I had to install the newest version of windows and all of the updates. When they found out that it took over 45 minutes to build the target software on my computer they dug up another one. The problem with the new one was that it would not work with the monitor that I had. Two days later we had the adapter cable I needed for the monitor but that I had to go out on the net to find video drivers. This comedy went on for a couple of weeks before they fired me for not making any progress. I was relieved.
My latest penny-pinching roadblock was a CVS server that failed because the disk filled up. With disks costing less than $100/100 Gig. There’s no reason for this. Unless of course the file server is so old that they can’t use modern disk drives. It wouldn’t surprise me.