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Comment by FooHentai | Hacker News Reader

>Insistence that all devs time must be billable

That one can hit all areas of ICT real bad when the company is a managed service provider, leading to a 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom' where the company provides great outsource ICT services offering to its clients, but runs an absolute shitshow for it's own systems because they're chronically under resourced (you can't bill it, so don't spend time on it).

That has extra interesting results when such a company tries to spin up and sell services which it's built/hosting/maintaining/developing itself.

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This last point is universal in companies that bill hourly.

I think I get what you mean by 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom', but I've never heard either colloquialism before and can't find anything on Google, either. What's the origin of these terms?

"Too many chefs in the kitchen" is the first one. Not sure about the second, but probably the same kinda thing.

There is a required reference here to "Too Many Cooks". Thanks, Adult Swim!

Based on the context, something like "the cobbler's children have no shoes" meaning they are too busy doing paid work for others to the same work for themselves.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159004/the-cobbl...

I don't think it's related to too many chef's in the kitchen. More a reference to chefs having a spotless kitchen at their day job, but a messy kitchen at home. Likewise for plumbers.

Hadn't heard that one before, interesting observation.

A lot of non-tech companies treat IT as a cost center and that can lead to short sighted decisions that cost them a lot in the long run (or more accurately, they fail to realize benefits that were available to them with appropriate investment).

But it seems counter intuitive that this effect can be worse for some tech companies, where a major part of their business involves convincing clients to treat their tech as more than just a cost center.

Like, you have an entire staff compliment of developers, architects, PMs, engineers and customer service staff, and your own entire ICT practice is a disaster? HOW?

I ended up having to draw people's attention to it by pointing out 'this is your single biggest client, and receives the least attention of them all'.

Loops into the old 'eat your own dog food' wisdom, but from an angle that seems to often get missed.

Well you could be like IBM which sells remote working solutions but has banned it for their own staff. Or maybe that was HP, or both.

That was a slimy downsizing measure. IBM doesn't have to pay severance if their remote workers quit on their own rather than come in 9 to 5.

Because of this mindset, companies who decided to outsource IT as an obvious cost optimization realized how their company actually runs.

Specifically that there are huge off-the-record operations (outside of the ticket system). The more VIP the problem is, the less tickets.

And suddenly, the people supporting them (particularly if they were outsourced but stayed in the company as contractors, and were pissed off) had one sentence "open a ticket". Doesn't matter if this is the CEO asking, or something "urgent", ticket it is.

And the gates to hell opened.

Source : me not being IT anymore (huge company) but strongly advocating against the outsourcing (pointing to the above), and then taking a backseat and watching the world burn with popcorn in hand.

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