Jurassic Park (1993) is a cautionary tale not of hubris, but not investing in proper IT Management

He's an old man. He doesn't understand IT and underestimated it. It was contrasted in the movie by the kid that said, "It's UNIX, I know this!" to show that kids nowadays know computers, unlike old people.

Which is ironic, btw, because UNIX has so many versions it's silly to even mention that something is UNIX. It's like seeing a random car then say "It's V6, I can fix this." It just shows that Spielberg doesn't understand IT either.

The whole "spared no expense" thing was made up by the movie. In the book it was clear that Hammond was cutting corners everywhere, so his treatment of Nedry doesn't look as contradictory as it does in the movie. The movie changed Hammond's personality significantly. In fact they switched his personality with that of the lawyer Gennaro. In the book, Gennaro is the nice guy with a conscience while Hammond is a typical greedy rich guy who's just out for money. The movie even switched the line about charging people $10,000 a day; in the book it was Hammond who said that, while in the movie it was Gennaro.

I love the movie (in fact it's the earliest movie I can remember seeing; I still have the VHS I've had since I was 4 years old), but the movie is a rather loose adaptation of the book and it's a mistake to rely on the movie to analyze what the story is about.

You are making the assumption that Nedry was not well compensated. I don't buy Nedry's argument, I think he was well paid.

By the way the movie portrayed Nedry, it is safe to assume that he had self-control issues. A smart man, but a overweight slob. You can be smart in on area of life (computers) and a complete dunce in another (money management).

Nedry, just like his weight issues, lost self control with his spending. Of course he couldn't blame himself, so he targeted money bags.

I agree with your secondary argument, that the money should have been spread around to a team, instead of just two people.

You wouldn't be the first to notice this. Even back in '93 when this came out, people talking about the film said that this park could have succeeded if they hadn't had someone like Nedry in charge of electronic security. Now that you pointed it out, it does seem kinda cheap for Hammond to have spent all this money on the park, but not on staff for one of the most important areas of the park's infrastructure. In fact, even by 90s standards, it makes no sense to have one guy in charge of all of that, with no support tech staff, and not pay him well for the job.

However, Nedry strikes me as the type who spends money like a drunken sailor every time he gets any, so it's possible that he was well-paid for his job, but would use his paycheck irresponsibly and then whine about not being "paid enough" by Hammond's company. That's probably one reason Hammond got disgusted with him in that argument. It sounds like one of many he'd had to deal with since hiring the guy.

Nedry himself is a cautionary tale, albeit a slightly different one woven into the main message of the movie. His involves "greed will eventually lead to your downfall."

I thought it was funny that in the movie they keep mentioning that the closest living relatives to dinosaurs are birds. Birds! Birds!

“We are missing some DNA sequences, where do we get them from?”

“Frogs!”

The other lesson is, of course:

If you're dealing with dangerous animals, build some damn solid fences.