Foot guns

A foot gun a situation or context in which an inexperienced person may unintentionally undermine their own efforts. Foot guns commonly come in the form of counterintuitive features or properties of a product that encourage mistakes have unintended negative consequences.

A common example of a foot gun is an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) that does not automatically invest deposits to the account. A person may diligently deposit money into an IRA, expecting it to grow as a long-term investment, only to find after several years that the money was deposited but never invested.