The Hidden Cost of the Quick Fix

Early on at PropMall, one of our listing feeds would occasionally break overnight. Someone would notice in the morning, log in, re-run the import by hand, and we’d move on. It took ten minutes. Everyone thanked the person who fixed it.

We were rewarding the wrong thing.

That ten-minute fix ran maybe three times a week. Nobody added it up. Across a quarter it was hours of senior attention, spent re-solving a problem we had already “solved” dozens of times. Worse, it was invisible — because each instance was small, the total never showed up anywhere we looked.

The tell

The question I use now is simple: if this exact situation happens ten more times, will I have to think about it ten more times?

If the answer is yes, I haven’t built a system. I’ve built a habit of firefighting and dressed it up as competence. The feed didn’t need a faster human; it needed a check that caught the failure, retried automatically, and only escalated to a person when something genuinely novel happened.

Why hacks win in the moment

Hacks are seductive because the cost structure is dishonest. The fix is cheap now and expensive later, and “later” is somebody else’s problem — or your own future self’s, who isn’t in the room to object. A system inverts that: expensive now, nearly free forever.

The bias toward hacks is really a bias toward whoever is present versus whoever is absent. Present-you gets the fast win. Absent-you, and everyone downstream, pays the recurring tax.

What changed

We rebuilt the import as a small, boring, self-healing system. It has caught that failure automatically ever since. No one gets thanked for it in the morning — which is exactly the point.

The heroics disappeared. That’s what winning looks like.