
Ask HN: What costly inefficiency do you see at work? - jtraffic
I&#x27;m 95% curious, 5% hoping some HN reader gets a startup out of it.
======
aianus
Countless AWS instances with less than 1% utilization costing millions of
dollars a year. It's easier to raise more money than try to fix it, so it just
keeps getting worse.

Focusing on pumping vanity 'growth' metrics when our product has negative
gross margins. We have no idea if anyone likes using our product or if they're
just using us to buy dollar bills for $0.97. However management is ego-driven
(we're going to "change the world") and it's easier to raise another round
than to make a profit.

~~~
daxfohl
The first one is even valid on a personal level. (well at a smaller scale).
There was a big thing on NPR a year ago about this, what they called "zombie
money" or something like that. I know I have various
AWS/DO/Heroku/Namecheap/GApps/Dropbox accounts that I've been paying for for
years and haven't canceled "just in case". Granted I've cleaned up a lot as it
used to be 2-3x that. I have to imagine I'm not the only one.

This is actually possibly a good problem for a real startup. Though somewhat
technical, there's certainly quite a bit of tedium there, per
[http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html),
so it's potentially really profitable.

~~~
thecolorblue
Do you see the work being converting standard EC2/Heroku/DO... servers to
lambda/cloud functions?

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GLenH
Government: money expires after two years. Which means that if you come in
under budget, you have to find something else to spend the money on - which is
sometimes needed infrastructure, like upgraded computers, but is more often
whatever happens to be in stock at Supply. Or you dump it on a contract with a
services contractor with whom you already have a contract vehicle in place. Or
you lose it. But you can't save it. You can't hold onto it to do more work on
the project after the two years is up.

You also can't extend the deadline for project completion in case of
unforeseen events. If you run out of time, but not money, you just have to
stop, because the money evaporates.

~~~
ortusdux
A friend of mine was a radio tech and he was ordered to put in a 1.2mil PO for
a new transmitter because a wire was frayed. They could have just replaced the
wire for 20$, but then they would have lost that 1.2mil off the next year's
budget.

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chadgeidel
Corporate IT - which is now it's own behemoth in most modern organizations.
IMHO it's actively preventing any work getting done. There are tons of
startups that are meeting this need (generally referred to as "dark IT" or
"shadow IT").

More power to you if you find yourself actually meeting business needs over
the company's own internal programmers and systems folks.

I am, of course, trying to effect change from within the org I am employed by.

~~~
sebazzz
Corporate IT is a disaster. So many people responsible for only one thing,
causing them not to think outside their box. Going from one conference call to
the other without any dedicated focus on the project. Instead of getting an
application live in several days, it costs months. Slow communication, cheap
outsourcing so in the end you need to do constant hand-holding to complete
installation of an web application.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

~~~
nmstoker
Absolutely, the more layers the worse it gets. It's a version of Chinese
whispers/Telephone where not only is confusion added at each stage but huge
amounts of time delay.

------
gdulli
Spending more money on AWS services than we'd spend hosting them ourselves,
spending more time beating our head against insufficient documentation of
proprietary Amazon services and wrappers compared to their corresponding open
source technologies, spending more time debugging and on general uncertainty,
spending more time waiting for responses from another company, having to stop
what we're doing and handle backward incompatibility on Amazon's schedule
instead of our own, spending more developer hours and fewer sysadmin hours on
managing and debugging services instead of more sysadmin hours and fewer
developer hours on our own services. (Developer hours are more costly and
scarce.)

~~~
beams_of_light
I hear the AWS argument quite a bit, but am not quite sure if the costs of AWS
vs. independent infrastructure have been appropriately analyzed by the person
making the accusation, in many cases. Independent infrastructure ages and
requires updating as time goes on. Amazon normalizes those costs and provides
the billed entity with semi-predictable costs on an ongoing basis. Keep in
mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well.

~~~
falcolas
Good accountants can amortize the costs of servers (etc.) just as well as AWS
can.

> Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well.

And it will still probably be cheaper to host your own, with one caveat: if
you have wildly varying traffic loads, AWS' autoscaling is hard to beat. The
reality is, though, most companies don't have traffic loads which vary enough
to justify the extra costs.

------
goalieca
Seen it at previous work places. Focusing too much the agile boards and not
enough on engineering. Then hire expensive Consultants because you're hitting
the wall.

~~~
smokeyj
I've seen this many times. I think it usually comes down to whoever designed
the initial architecture. If you have a bad foundation there's no saving you.
Many times the architect had political influence and overrode general
censuses.

I worked a project with a public company that had a 1:1 dev / scrum master
ratio. Then they brought on consultants for a straight week for full time
training to fix the lack of progress. You can't make these things up..

------
flippy2
Putting product in charge of engineering instead of making is a partnership.

Then not holding product accountable for an inspired roadmap that is delivered
2 months into the half.

My team is working way below peak efficiency for 4 months a year as a result.
The engineers are super unhappy about this but there is "nothing to be done"
according to my boss and his bosses boss.

~~~
iamdave
Do we work together?? /s

But yes, the amount of reversions, refactors and plain jane "we gotta rebuild
this" has lead to some real fatigue at least from me.

------
kevas
Our department gets a few thousand projects a year (work in large format
printing). The amount of repetitive steps that each project share is simply
mind boggling. By writing 10 or so scripts, was able to shave department labor
hours down by 14%.

Excel... how people use excel and the amount of waste that happens just
because they don't properly know how to use 'vlookup' or 'if' simply just
boils my blood.

~~~
overcast
Excel is the universal format for the enterprise.

Need to share a screen shot of your error? Paste it into excel.

Project management? Excel.

Database of assets? Excel.

Transactional information? Excel.

Incredibly complex, multi page calculations? Excel.

Kill me.

~~~
w4tson
I once saw a very detailed Gantt chart in MS Project detailing 6 months worth
of lies about various projects would deliver.

My colleague nudged me out of a stupor as I stared at the overhead projection.
"Its Excel!" He whispered. "What are you on about?" I said. He was clearly
mad. "The chart! He's done it in Excel". To my horror I began to see. This
wasn't MS Project at all. It was subtle because the cells were so small they
were almost no bigger than a pixel. I gasped and almost took the presentation
off course.

It was like a mosaic. A feat. I've never seen anything like it since. Still
baffles me how much effort he must have put in and the pain he must've felt
every time that crappy plan inevitably moved to the right.

~~~
overcast
I'm not sure if we should commend, or condemn Microsoft for making a
application that is so easily used by less than savvy end users.

------
daxfohl
Ironically, it sometimes seems the biggest inefficiency is the millions of
incompatible never-finished initiatives to remove costly inefficiencies.

~~~
daxfohl
No startup idea here (well, other than becoming the outsourcer for the
1,000,001st), but seems like good ground for an xkcd or two.

------
7952
Internal transaction costs. My company has dozens of different offices who
each invoice each other, sometimes in circles. We need to make internal
markets easier to operate

------
hprotagonist
Disposable utensils, cups, etc. in the break room and kitchen.

But i'm kind of a dirty hippie.

~~~
snikeris
My office just got rid of these and I've been grumpy about it. I didn't
consider the environmental angle though, assumed it was just corporate greed.

~~~
hprotagonist
The only downside is that, at least once, some hapless intern is guaranteed to
load the dishwasher with hand soap. I don't know why, but there's always one.

------
horusthecat
"Buy don't build" becoming such an embedded piece of wisdom that there are
literally a half-dozen COTS appliances that do the same thing, but not
inventorying them, to the point that you might have just one or more likely
zero people using them. Literally no one watches our DLP tool, but we keep
paying for it.

It's basically a field day for consultants and for appliance vendors. I'm not
a huge fan of NIH but it's really demoralizing to see money get spent on toys
that immediately get locked up in the attic.

------
mastratton3
Meetings - I think anytime someone mentions they won't be able to get things
done because of meetings, they should reassess if the meeting is needed at
all.

------
kafkaesq
The most costly inefficiencies I've seen are companies / organizations that
are wrongly constituted to begin with.

For example, when you have a division of larger company that really should be
its own company. But, no one's allowed to talk about that because "that's been
talked to death already" and the show must go on, etc. Or because no on really
cares (or bothers to think about things on that level) basically.

~~~
a-priori
This is a sign that you're working too far down the hierarchy. Problems like
this can always be solved, if indeed it's a problem, if you go high enough up
in the org chart.

------
cname
One of the major causes of inefficiency is bad management--the cause behind
many of the responses given here.

Incompetent managers up the chain don't have a coherent vision that moves us
forward. They spend most of their time playing at politics, trying to look
good, maintaining the status quo, and/or attempting to coalesce power/status.
Even good managers get caught up in this game. It seems to be the nature of
the system.

On my team, for example, we have too many projects, projects taken on for the
wrong reasons, and projects that don't fit our team's skillset. Most of those
projects aren't managed well or even managed at all.

Old projects molder with no real plan for fixing them, so we spend inordinate
amounts of time on every change. New projects are announced with someone
claiming that they'll be "easy", but there's no plan and things don't get done
or they get done badly. Sometimes I sit here in pure bewilderment wondering
what the point of it all is.

Is there some way a startup could tackle organizational/social issues? That
seems like an interesting idea, but I can't think of how it might work.

~~~
khaledtaha
I believe the future of companies will be internal startups vying for
investment dollars. With disruption challenging even the most traditional and
stable industries, we'll think back and muse to ourselves as to how political
and beauracratic we were.

That being said politics will always exist, but not the debilitating level
(IMO) to which we've seen in the past.

------
thinbeige
Politics.

Using the too expensive AWS and Google Cloud where DO would have been totally
fine.

People who can't admit their mistakes or even blame others for theirs.

Bad architectural decisions.

Kubernetes instead of Docker Swarm for small clusters without any traffic or
just plain Docker.

Expensive Github instead of free Bitbucket.

Asana, Jira, Pivotal Tracker instead of free Trello.

Slack.

Self-hosting of non-core tools.

Team retreats nobody wants.

Team events nobody wants.

Team members with weak communication skills.

Teams which are not synced, where some come after lunch and some finish few
minutes later.

------
tiggybear
Hiring consultants to absolve management of accountability for decisions.

~~~
CabSauce
My favorite is management hiring management consultants. Isn't that the whole
job?

------
muzani
Competition. A lot of people generally like to harm their colleague's odds of
success - they pass accountability, responsibility, work, force them to attend
more meetings, force them to use more communication software. Basically trying
to look good by making someone else look bad.

It would be very effective if everyone worked together towards a common goal.
This really isn't an issue in fast growing companies but the slower the growth
of a company is, the more destructive competition sinks in.

------
fusiongyro
Mandated technology decisions. Strap in for a dozen man-years of technical
debt on a platform your team doesn't understand but now must debug.

------
remline
Building the main campus in SF Bay then formalizing a location pay
differential, then SF Bay staff pestering the distributed talent to move to SF
Bay and fly to SF Bay for every team bonding/etc until they quit or move to SF
Bay (and then quit as they actually need double the salary just to get back to
their previous standard of living.)

------
daxfohl
At big companies, just communication between departments. Startup idea: a
"heroku" for enterprises, where companies own their own "heroku", and each
division/group provides a "plugin" that they manage. Would make things much
more consistent among departments, and integrating solutions so much easier.

~~~
dmlittle
Convox[1] does somewhat of what you're asking for. The simplest way to
describe it is a roll your own PaaS.

[1] [https://convox.com/](https://convox.com/)

------
fiftyacorn
Jupming on every framework as soon as it comes out - instead of stabilising
technology to meet business needs

------
twobyfour
Not to start a flamewar, but... Cramming expensive engineers shoulder to
shoulder in a giant distracting concrete box of an open office, yards from the
sales team yammering on the phone all day.

------
kanzure
builds that take longer than 2 seconds

------
mdlap
Being unwilling to spend money on good tools, forcing everyone to work around
the failings of sub-standard free tools. I'm talking about you, TestLink.

------
ucaetano
Putting product in charge of engineering, or engineering in charge of product.

Or engineering or product in charge of business.

------
weixiyen
people not doing work

~~~
Finnucane
Does reading HN at work count?

------
JamesBarney
Hacker News

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krallja
Meeting up in person (mostly-remote company)

------
grafelic
Undocumented legacy systems.

------
garyfirestorm
Union

------
louithethrid
The great cycle.. lets not code too much ourselves, lets only be experts at
our domain, lets use librarys. The librarys fail, they do not deliver the
expected performance, they cant be customized or are suddenly not maintained
and we can not port our whole ecosystem.

Lets write most of our code ourselves, get independent from external actors,
but we are slow now, glacial and distributed to reinvent a lot of wheels,
while others outpace use in our domain. We should use more librarys.

------
kapauldo
Sales force.

