Comment by skeptrune
2 years ago
Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?
2 years ago
Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?
It's not about being good for shareholders. They are far away and generally know nothing about what is good or bad decision in long run. We have replaced human QC with computers in many industries. C-suite cares about company profit, middle management cares about KPI.
It's about maximizing individual management KPI despite being wrong for a company as a whole. Problems are for other guys/gals down the line.
> It's about maximizing individual management KPI
so you could argue that those people setting the KPI is either incompetent, or they themselves benefit from such a KPI (at the cost of the company going down).
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” -- Goodhart's law
Could just be that chasing KPIs is inherently bad because people will game them no matter what.
Back in ~ 2003-2004 I was working for an American company that did exactly that. The story was simple, they outsourced all IT (a few thousands) to a well known tech company. The selling point? "The tech company has a lot of expertise and scale and we will benefit from that". The results? The tech company took all the good engineers, moved them to work in other areas for other clients and replaced them with entry level technicians. It took a few years to start feeling the pain of what they did and a few more years to start reversing the change. By that time the C level people already retired rich, even today, 20 years later, the IT in that company is a terrible shade of "great leaders" and very low engineering skills outsourcing left and right anything more complicated than basic project management.