On Frupitidy
In a recent episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, in an Interview with Dave Anderson who used to work as an EM at Amazon, Dave dropped the word "Frupidity". The origins of this word trace back to a blog entry by Ethan Evans, who defines it as follows:
This name comes when the principle of Frugality is applied without an eye towards value and in practice is implemented as “do not spend money.”
This resonated with me, as it gives me the opportunity to list an example of frupitidy that really is a bit of a pet peeve for me: Arguing About Hotel Costs.
Let's say you need to go on a business trip. The approved hotel cost range goes up to 120 EUR, but there's a fair in town, and the next best available room costs 150 EUR for the night. What to do?
It's Frupid to force the employee into a cheaper hotel further away from the center, and it's even more Frupid to argue about this.
Leaving the fact aside that this really makes you look cheap as an employer, which will take its toll on the motivation of the person, you really don't win a lot if the company then needs to pay for the transportation from the replacement hotel room.
Arguing about it makes it even worse. Let me back up a bit for some explanation.
Back in 2011, my first job was working as a consultant. I knew I had an Internal Cost Rate of 50 EUR back then, so taking all together, my salary, vacation, sickness, hardware, training, everything cost the company 50 bucks per hour. That number is now horribly outdated, and obviously it didn't apply to people from higher level even back then, but I have no better non-made up number available so let's go with it.
So, when you and the employee have 30 minutes of discussion in total about the issue, both of you have cost the company a total of 50 EUR. In other words: You invested 50 EUR to avoid 30 EUR of extra hotel costs.[1] Well done! No, just kidding: That was Frupid.
See also: Amazon's 6-Pagers for something else I took with me from this episode
I once worked for a really charismatic and genuinely great CEO, who had the bad habit of leaving everyone waiting. And while I was waiting, I used the Internal Cost Rates from above to approximate just how costly it was. Delaying a global call by 10 minutes, leaving 500 people waiting? That's a lot of hotel room surcharges he could have paid with this. ↩︎
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