> So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.
What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?
What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?
You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's bosses all the way up!
(Of course, in practice regular people by and large don't vote their shares.)
For the former, if at all possible, you should sell those, and invest in the general market: your job already gives you plenty of excess exposure to the fortunes of your employer, and your career gives you excess exposure to the general industry you are in. No need to concentrate your effective investments even more. Diversify.
For the latter: don't bother picking stocks as an individual investor. Just go with a low cost index fund (and they can vote the shares for you).
I'm not sure why I would care about what the board/management of some /other/ public company (that I don't work for) thinks about my vote. Almost certainly they won't think about it at all.
(There's an impeachment process. But that's not available for regular voters.)
Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well.
It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.
Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.
"Sucking the company dry" is a really shortsighted way to optimize for your own best life. You're going to have a better life if you use your resources to actually accomplish something that contributes.
I think how true this is varies from person to person.
But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either?
Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money?
Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?
I think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least!
In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it.
It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.