Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Things were running well. The executive thought that IT was bloated and made cuts. Things were no longer running well. Far more money was lost in the company's dysfunction than saved by the cuts.

Sounds like a bad executive to me.

I never implied that there aren't good managers and executives, but only that most of them aren't, because most of them get caught up in "boredom trading" that doesn't solve problems, but is just managerial action for action's sake.

View on HN

First, he said the savings almost certainly less than the cost of the waste. This sounds like a guess. He gives no numbers, and doesn't appear to have quantified anything.

Second, maybe IT was running so smoothly previously because it was bloated, and was a huge drain on company resources. Maybe it was running smoothly because a bad manager refused to put a limit on anything, leading to a division whos costs were completely out of control.

We have no idea, because there are no details in the article about the company, or about the IT spending before OR after the cuts.

The exact quote is:

"Of course, it all went to shit. New employees would go a week before they had machines, phones, passwords, and ACLs. Printers ran out of paper, projectors ran out of lightbulbs, servers ran out of storage, networks got misconfigured, and so forth. The total time lost and wasted across the whole company was most certainly greater than the savings of laying off the expensive and skilled IT staff."

The guy might be a bit biased but it's completely clear from his article that even though he might not have exact numbers the company was much better off(not only in terms of total profit) with the old IT department.

Are you a manager?

No, it's clear from the article that he thought the company was worse off.. but really had no details to back it up.

All we know from the article is that IT was worse off. But we have no idea how the company as a whole is doing.

Maybe you aren't aware, but most companies consist of more than the IT dept.

The OP does have details to back it up, just not hard numbers. He states how new employees had problems getting setup, old employees dealing with misc problems, things not running smoothly in general. Yes most companies consist of more than IT but these days the problem is many organizations seem to look at IT as an extra expense they can skimp on or even completely do without("The bosses son is really good with computer's he can fix any problems that arise!"). Theres two sides to every story and maybe this department was bloated and could've used some restructuring we don't know that part for sure but we do know that things went from everyone being able to work efficiently to all sorts of random issues, suffered by general employees not IT that should've been avoided.

You're taking this awfully personally, I'll ask again do you do in some sort of managerial position? Do you have some personal experience with this sort of thing?

The OP does have details to back it up ... employees had problems getting setup

Ok.. tell me about those employees. How much do they get paid? Minimum wage? What do they do? Do they even require a desk?

A week to setup a desk that the employee doesn't even need because they are required to travel constantly is not a problem.

You're taking this awfully personally

I'm not taking any of this personally. You're just sensitive because someone is suggesting that an IT dept might have required cuts.

Geez.. for people who are so scientifically-minded, you sure do seem eager to take everything in the article on faith.

I'm the OP.

The employees were expensive software developers, electrical engineers, RF signal electrical engineers, and microelectronics design engineers. There probably was one person making minwage. She was a very sweet developmentally disabled girl who delivered the mail to our desks.

Similarly, we don't know the names of any of those executives. That means we don't know if we currently work for them. If we work for other executives, we shouldn't assume that we can generalize this story to our experience!

In fact, since the odds of this exact management team starting a new company in exactly the same industry with exactly the same business model are close to zero, I think we can agree that it would be impossible to learn anything from this story even if we DID know all the details.

A few years later, the company itself was effectively dead.

Which leaves the question, was the cut in IT a cause or a symptom? It could have been the last in a long line of bad decisions; I can't see this bringing down a company all by itself.

I'm the OP. After few years of bad IT hell, the rest of the company was almost completely dead in the water, in part because of the bad IT drag, and in part because of other management decisions that had bad outcomes. I then left when it was gutted with layoffs. A few years after that, it was sold for pennies on the dollar prices to a low-quality technology aggregration company.

There is a difference in meaning between most certainly (what was actually written) and almost certainly (your misquotation, and apparently your reading).

I think you're trying to argue (in multiple responses) that the evidence in the article doesn't rule out all other hypotheses, so we shouldn't take it as proof.

Sure.

It's not a formal proof. It's a narrative of a general pattern that we might want to learn from. If we can learn from narratives that are completely false - raganwald's excellent posts come to mind - then surely we can learn from narratives that are not scientifically rigorous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com