One piece of advice I heard recently was 'spend the company's money and your time as though it is your money and your time'.

I've seen this work spectacularly badly at Universities, where every effort is made to horde the income from projects for 'rainy days', to the detriment of the project. Very similar to the way the project leader ran his own finances (lived like a pauper on a strong salary). This was really bad in two ways: His group constantly ran cost over-runs because of equipment failures because of the refusal to service or upgrade equipment, or doing specialist tasks in-house rather than contracting the specialist (usually the statistician). This also often breached the contract with the agency who gave him the grant money for his project! All the funds were for a specific project, not something else and not for profit (which is how 'savings' have to be catagorised here). What was worst was that he never spent those savings, the internal account he stashed his savings in kept getting (legitimately) skimmed to cover costs in other projects (company accounts aren't bank accounts after all).

Money, especially a clients money for a project, is to be spent not saved.1

1 This of course excludes the money marked as 'profit' that should be taken out of the project managers hands immediately, I'm talking about the money that was marked down as 'costs'. Never ever bloody ever run under budget.

In reply to Re^2: The dangers of perfection, and why you should stick with good enough by Bloodrage
in thread The dangers of perfection, and why you should stick with good enough by redhotpenguin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.