An electrical engineer I worked with told me about a similar situation he had encountered at a previous job. He would design a circuit only to have another eng

An electrical engineer I worked with told me about a similar situation he had encountered at a previous job. He would design a circuit only to have another engineer (responsible for cost cutting), remove or modify a component. The resulting design would not work as well. To get around this, he would add some sacrificial extra component like a resistor. The cost cutter would remove this leaving the original design intact.