Frupidity: The Silent Killer of Productivity and Innovation
10th February 2025
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.
I like the Rule of Twenty: If you run across something you’re not using that can be replaced in twenty minutes or less for twenty dollars or less, throw it out.