Manager refuses to spend $50 on external software, insisting engineer waste company resources developing a platform in-house: 'This project was costing the company roughly $4,000 in billing hours'

Author image for Ben Weiss
Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Jun 7, 2026 8:00 AM EDT

It's always remarkable what management considers to be a waste of resources and what they consider to be a worthy investment.

This software engineer, who shared his side of the story on Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit, was told by his manager that they needed a tool for a complex data extraction project for an important client. Time was tight, and the software engineer managed to find a quick way to outsource this work. For a simple $50/month subscription to another service, they could get the project completed for the client.

For whatever reason, this pitch was a bridge too far for upper management. The engineer's supervisor rejected the pitch and insisted that he take the time to develop new software for the project in-house. The engineer tried to explain to his manager that this would take a lot of time and resources, but the manager refused to take his protestations seriously. Talk about famous last words.

Add as a preferred
source on Google
Advertisement
  • A man looks at a series of monitors as he works in a cramped office. The subject is a model.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    A man looks at a series of monitors as he works in a cramped office. The subject is a model.

  • Management saved fifty bucks a month by wasting twenty thousand dollars of my time

    I work as a senior dev for a company that loves to talk about lean operations which is just corporate speak for being cheap
    via Thimble_4QX
  • as A few months ago we needed a specific tool to handle some complex data extraction and PDF parsing for a major client. I found a rock-solid SaaS platform that cost exactly fifty dollars a month for a team subscription. It had a perfect API
    via Thimble_4QX
  • and would have taken me maybe an hour to set up the whole pipeline. I sent the request to my manager thinking it was a total no-brainer. He called me into a meeting and gave me a long. lecture about how we shouldn't be relying on third party subscriptions for core business
    via Thimble_4QX
  • logic. He literally told me that paying for a monthly subscription when you have "high priced engineers" on the payroll is just lazy.
    via Thimble_4QX
  • A representation of a software engineer pointing at a monitor as he works in a small office.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    A representation of a software engineer pointing at a monitor as he works in a small office.

  • I tried to explain that reinventing this specific wheel would be a massive waste of resources but he wouldnt budge. He gave me a direct order to stop looking at external vendors and build our own proprietary parser from
    via Thimble_4QX
  • scratch. He wanted it to be a company asset that we could own forever. I realized there was no point in arguing so I decided to follow his instructions to the letter. I stopped all work on the actual client features and started deep diving into the nightmare that is the PDF file structure. If
    via Thimble_4QX
  • you have ever worked with raw PDF data you know it is a h scape of inconsistent encodings and binary junk.
    via Thimble_4QX
  • I spent the next three months in a dark room fighting with coordinate systems and bitstreams. Every week at the standup meeting my manager would ask for an update and I would tell him that building world-class tech takes time and
    via Thimble_4QX
  • precision. He would just nod and talk about how much money we were saving by not paying that monthly fee. My salary is well into the six figures so every week I spent on this project was costing the company roughly four thousand dollars in billing hours.
    via Thimble_4QX
  • By the time I had a semi- functional version that didn't crash on every second file we were twelve weeks into the savings plan.
    via Thimble_4QX
  • A photographic depiction of an engineer working on monitors.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    A photographic depiction of an engineer working on monitors.

  • The final math is just ridiculous. I spent nearly five hundred hours on this propriertary tool. At my internal rate that is twenty thousand dollars of engineering time. All of this to avoid a fifty dollar monthly bill. The best part
    via Thimble_4QX
  • is that my version is nowhere near as good as the original service I found. It is buggy and it only handles the specific layouts we are using right now. If the client updates their report format
    via Thimble_4QX
  • next month I will have to spend another two weeks fixing my code. My manager however is thrilled. He actually presented the tool to the directors as a strategic innovation that we developed in-house.
    via Thimble_4QX

  • Now, the manager is up in arms, wondering why productivity steeply declined over the last quarter. Perhaps the reason has something to do with the fact that you, sir, refused to pay $50 for what could have saved the entire company thousands of dollars' worth of work. Sure, now you have an admittedly shoddy software for this kind of data extraction of your own. However, the engineer made a point to explain that what he created would need to be radically adjusted for future projects, so it's not exactly time or money well spent.

     

  • A software engineer goes through notes as he works on monitors in an office. Subject is a model.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    A software engineer goes through notes as he works on monitors in an office. Subject is a model.

  • I saw the quarterly budget report recently and our department is way over on labor costs while our project delivery is lagging behind.
    via Thimble_4QX
  • My manager is currently scrambling to figure out why productivity dropped so much in the last quarter. I just sent him a status update for the new feature
    via Thimble_4QX
  • list and told him I would get started on them as soon as I finish the next round of bug fixes for our parser. I guess that is just the price of having an in-house asset instead of a fifty dollar subscription.
    via Thimble_4QX
  • Anyway I have a bug report to ignore for at least three hours while I drink my coffee.
    via Thimble_4QX

  • This is not the first instance of poor use of company resources that members of this online community have come across. For more stories like this, take a look at this article about an employee who caught their manager bending the rules as well as this piece about an employee who automated their work tasks without anyone knowing.

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

toxic-manager employee work stories malicious compliance engineering Horrible Bosses workplace malicious compliance
Scroll Down For The Next Article