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Comment by repelsteeltje

9 hours ago

I guess it's simply the externalities issue. Finance people optimize finance, which among other things results in improved efficiency. But despite best intentions to map out all incentives that matter, it always fails to consider some aspects. Focusing on short-term profits, ignoring privacy, security or pollution because it's free, lobbying for favourable legislation that hampers competitors, etc.

These are things that don't show in a spreadsheet unless you're explicitly incentivized to look at them. But that's never the case because the number of KPIs is always finite while there are infinitely many aspects that could potentially be subverted.

Why does "optimizing finance" improve the efficiency in an engineering company? Seems to me like "optimizing finance" could be absolutely detrimental for the bottom line.