Funding creativity a nickel at a time

[lucale]

Hello,
I'm reading "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott and I found this sentence when the author is explaining an hiring process of people to do dull work:
<<I tried convincing them that we were "funding creativity a nickel at a time">>.
What does it mean this expression?

 

[emsr2d2]

Hello.

I'm reading "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott and I found this sentence when the author is explaining [STRIKE]a hiring[/STRIKE] the process of hiring people to do [STRIKE]dull[/STRIKE] boring work:

"I tried convincing them that we were "funding creativity a nickel at a time"."

What does [STRIKE]it mean[/STRIKE] this expression mean?

Please note my corrections above. Don't use << and >> round quotes. Use standard quotation marks.

The person was trying to make boring low-paid work sound more interesting and important than it actually is.

 

[GoesStation]

In the United States and Canada, nickel is the common name for the five-cent coin.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

Please note my corrections above. Don't use << and >> round quotes. Use standard quotation marks.

The person was trying to make boring low-paid work sound more interesting and important than it actually is.

I read it differently. To me it means the speaker is saying that they aren't paying artists enough.

In the U.S., to "nickel and dime" someone is to underpay them. We might say that a cheap employer is "nickel and diming me to death." Here's a book by a popular journalist about low-wage U.S. workers:

Nickel and Dimed