I am sitting here writing this with my left eye half-closed because I managed to get peppermint shampoo in it about 23 minutes ago. It stings. It is a sharp, chemical reminder that sometimes the things meant to clean us just end up causing a localized crisis. That is exactly what ‘good-enough’ internal tools do to a workforce. They are sold as a solution-a way to streamline, to modernize, to ‘get us off spreadsheets’-but they usually just end up being a different kind of burn. We pretend it is fine because we are ‘scrappy,’ but scrappy is often just a polite word for negligent.

I’ve made this mistake myself. Once, in a previous role, I insisted we build an internal tracking system instead of buying one. I told the team it would be a ‘great learning experience’ and that it only needed to be 80% functional. I was wrong. That 20% of missing functionality wasn’t just a gap; it was a cliff. People spent more time trying to figure out why the search function didn’t work than they did actually doing their jobs. I had created a monster. I watched as people’s morale dipped, not because the work was hard, but because the tools made the work unnecessarily difficult. It’s like trying to perform surgery with a plastic fork. You can technically do it, but why would you ever want to?

The Complexity Multiplier (43 Open Spreadsheets)

Stella G.H. finally gets the portal to respond. It asks her to confirm her manager’s email address. The dropdown menu contains 233 names, most of whom left the company during the Great Resignation. The list isn’t alphabetized. It seems to be sorted by the date they were added to the LDAP server, which is a detail only a developer in 2017 would find logical. Stella spends 3 minutes scrolling to find a name that actually exists.

This is the hidden cost of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). For internal tools, MVP usually stands for ‘Minimum Vexation Provided.’ We tell ourselves we will fix it later. We say we will ‘iterate’ on the feedback. But we never do. There is always a new customer feature to ship, a new market to capture, a new fire to put out. The internal tool remains in its larval, broken state forever, a ghost of a hackathon long forgotten. It becomes a ritual of frustration. New employees are told, ‘Oh, that portal? Yeah, it’s weird. Just refresh three times and make sure you’re in an Incognito window.’ We socialize the dysfunction until it feels like a quirk rather than a failure.

The Financial Fallacy (Saving $100k vs. Losing $500k)

When you work in a high-stress environment, you need moments of clarity and quality to keep your sanity. You want to feel like the organization you are pouring your life into actually values the friction-less execution of your tasks. When everything is a struggle-from booking a flight to checking your paystub-you start to feel like a gear in a machine that is covered in grit. You start looking for the exit. You start dreaming of a world where things just work, where the craftsmanship extends to the backend, and where quality isn’t just a marketing buzzword. It’s about the difference between a cheap plastic cup and a crystal tumbler; when you finally settle down after a week of fighting 13 different broken APIs, you want

Old rip van winkle 12 year

level of smoothness in your professional life, not more sandpaper.

Where Engagement is Actually Won or Lost

I think about my eye again. It’s still red. I keep rubbing it, which I know I shouldn’t do, but the irritation demands a response. That’s what bad tools do. They create a physical need to vent, to complain, to stop working and just stare at the wall for 13 seconds of silent screaming. We talk about ’employee engagement’ in these big, lofty terms, but engagement happens in the UI. It happens in the latency of the database. It happens in the fact that Stella G.H. doesn’t have to enter her password 23 times a day because the SSO actually works.

Stella G.H. closes her laptop. She’s done for the day. The vacation request is still stuck in the ‘Pending’ state, even though she knows her manager approved it verbally 3 days ago. The system just hasn’t synced. She walks to her kitchen, her eye still slightly burning from the shampoo incident, and thinks about the 43 tabs she has to reopen tomorrow morning. She thinks about the grey rectangle button. She thinks about how much more she could have accomplished if she wasn’t also moonlighting as a manual debugger for a legacy system she didn’t ask for.

We need to stop pretending that ‘good enough’ is a standard. In the context of internal tools, ‘good enough’ is usually code for ‘we don’t care about your time.’ If we want professional work, we have to provide professional tools. We have to stop treating our internal teams like second-class citizens who should be grateful for whatever scraps of software the engineering department throws them after a sprint.

Stella G.H. deserves better. We all do. And until we acknowledge that the internal tool is the heartbeat of the operation, we’re just going to keep stinging our own eyes and wondering why everything looks so blurry. damn. blurry.