"I've worked for a couple of companies who function like this, it's really frustrating."

As in, "I've worked for companies that try to be cheap about their IT", not "I've worked for companies like Erik's". Working for a company like Erik's would be frustrating too, mainly because you then have to deal with people with that mindset. I've done it from the angle of software development consulting... it's miserable. You get people who want to pay you $2k to do a Web site that will take 2 months, and when you try explaining that it should cost $10k or $20k, they say, "but my niece said she could do it in a week with open source package XYZ!" And they don't want to hear that you've used open source package XYZ, and that the week is to set it up at a basic level of functionality, and then it needs another 6 months of modification and customization to do what they *want* and a week of design work to make things look really nice and work cross platform, which is why you said 2 months...

J.Ja