The only thing more frustrating to diagnose than a circuit that fails all the time is a circuit that fails some of the time. Trying to correct the issue becomes a lot harder if you don’t have a way to reliably reproduce the problem.

With that in mind I think most of the time if a manufacturer cheaped out on making a less reliable component then the engineer designing whatever circuit it was going to be in would probably rather find a more reliable chip, create a different, more reliable alternative to the problem, and/or try to omit that feature entirely. And I think if the manufacturer started cheaping out on those chips after the fact then it would be a stain on their reputation as suppliers of no longer reliable parts.

For every few cents the manufacturer might save on lowering the quality of an existing part they’re likely going to lose many more dollars on engineers no longer trusting that manufacturer to continue to provide parts they want to trust will be good when they’re producing their second 10,000 unit batch for the same circuit, or when that engineer is 5 projects down the line and needs that chip again.

Ah my bad, I guess it’s been longer than I realized since I’ve last seen the movie.

They’re making a reference to Office Space.

From what I’ve read, that’s only a story that it was based on climate temperatures in his hometown. According to the story phycist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit defined the 0 and 100 degree points of his scale as the highest and lowest temperatures regularly observed in his hometown of Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, then later when he needed to recreate the 0 point of his scale he came up with a brine that stabilizes at a specific temperature.

What we do know for certain is that the brine existed, was made of water, ice, and ammonium chloride, it did indeed stabilize at 0°F, and according to a letter he wrote the scale was based on the Rømer scale, but adjusted in magnitude so he could make 32 divisions between the brine stable temperature and the freezing point of a regular water solution, then 64 divisions between that point and what he observed to be the normal human temperature. The reason for 32 and 64 divisions was that since those numbers were factors of 2, they would be easier to divide linearly between their respective upper and lower bounds.

Fahrenheit observed that using this scale water boiled at roughly 212°F then after the popularity of the Celsius scale some 50 years later redefined his scale so that it kept the original freezing point of 32, but now had 180 divisions between Fahrenheit’s boiling point. This kept his existing scales fairly accurate to the new definition (the upper bound which was 96°F was now measured to be 98.6°F and the lower bound of the brine was 0°F now measured at 4°F) and used the new convention of defining the scale by water while keeping some nice number of divisions between their points, although they are a little more arbitrary now than they were before.