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Comment by Arnor | Hacker News Reader

It's time to leave that company. They don't deserve you.

Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.

People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why?

Team of manager salaries. They employee salaries. Contractor salaries.

There over 500 people working on this thing.

I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.

That'd be the president of the company (we're a small mechanical engineering firm), and he's even worse. He vetoed the request from my boss to upgrade to MS Office 2013. We're on a mix of XP/2003 right now, and Excel+Word are the lifeblood of our work.

Sounds like he'd be better. Especially if the veto was done with concern over cost. He'd likely appreciate how much cost this automation could save him.

So your manager just suggested that you upgrade all your machines from XP to windows 7, and upgrade office from 2003 to 2013? That's not necessarily kneejerk stupidity - did your manager include a list of benefits from upgrading, against a cost analysis, and allow for a test run of trying to run all your existing spreadsheets (presumably more complex than just a few numbers!) on the new system, or just say 'hey we should get a new version of everything we use, it won't cause any downtime' and the boss said like hell it won't? I think upgrading is probably a good idea, but it's definitely not a no-brainer 'ok do it tomorrow' idea.

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