At the scale of most major, non-startup tech companies, however, 99k worth of work is miniscule: it is less than the cost of a single fully-loaded engineer's salary and benefits package.

We can look at the manager based on this and see his choice from two angles, depending on if we assume he has good or bad faith for the company:

>Good faith:

"The large team is effectively guaranteed to succeed.

The likelihood that the 400 dollar solution works is an unknown quantity, and since that single engineer made it in the first place, I'd be putting a lot of negotiation power in his hands to ask for some large portion of the savings back as pay, meaning it's less likely we succeed and extremely possible he goes rogue. I'll go with the team."

>Bad faith:

"The company doesn't care about the difference between those numbers, they're the same at our scale. If I can waste ten people's time and net a sexy resume boost out of it for that little cost to the company, I'm probably the best manager they have.

No, you're not going to get to sabotage my next job if you're not going to do any work helping me spin this as somehow being better for my resume than me running a department with 10 people under me.

Actually, I've got an idea about that! I'm sure I can find something either wrong with your solution (or you) that allows me to say I tried for the savings, and after that failed, I went for the department I wanted anyways. I love a good compromise, don't you?"

Spot on. I'm getting flashbacks just reading this!

It's so easy to create FUD around "the $400 solution" that it's laughable.

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Upper management will be filled with so many questions:

* "If this is so cheap, why isn't everyone doing it this way? Surely all those important people wouldn't be wasting money, so there's gotta be something we're missing here."

* "What have we been paying 4 guys to do this whole time? Surely they would've figured this out earlier if it could've been done this way. I hope my boss doesn't hear that I've had a completely redundant department this whole time..."

* "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This guy is probably just trying to supplant my trusted middle manager by making him look like a money-waster. I need to tell my secretary to filter my emails better..."

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And middle management can easily say:

* "While Bob is able to get the same output right now, he is doing it in a non-scalable way that will have to be rewritten over and over again as we grow. Our way costs more upfront but it will allow us to expand to fulfill EXECS_WILDEST_DREAMS. You don't want to go down the day that you're featured in Fortune Magazine because Bob's data analysis script hammered the database, do you? We should use the solution you wisely previously approved, the solution on which you heard that compelling talk at CIOConf last year. It is much better than being penny wise and pound foolish!"

* "If I pull up Monster.com right now, there are 500 Hadoop candidates in our area. How many 'Bob's Data Processing Toolkit' candidates are there? We would be painting ourselves into a corner, and if Bob ever left us, we would be stranded."

* "I too was amazed by Bob's Data Processing Toolkit, and I enthusiastically tried it. Unfortunately, my best employee Sally pointed out that Bob's Toolkit causes disruptive fits of packet spasm in the switch hardware, threatening our whole network. I asked him to fix this but he says that he doesn't even think that problem is a real thing. Yes, he had the gall to impugn my best employee, Sally! He is clearly in denial about this and too close to see the impact objectively, so I put him on another task. [Under breath: he is also clearly a sexist pig, and we're lucky Sally didn't call HR.]

"It was a valiant effort and I do indeed applaud Bob for his attempts and concern for the company's well-being, and I assure you, Mr. Upper Manager, that we are continuing to analyze his Toolkit's mechanisms in depth and we will apply all savings and optimizations that we can. However, as you know, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, and it is just not realistic that a Very Important Company like ours could handle all of our Very Important Data for less than half the cost of your car payment each month."