
"The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors" - zdw
http://machinesplusminds.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-carpets-are-so-clean-we-dont-need.html
======
kevinalexbrown
In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience
is clear. Unfortunately, the downsides are rarely clear before the upsides,
and by the time the mistake is obvious, returning to the previous state is
difficult, and an incentive has been created for short term savings at the
expense of long term ones.

By way of example, several years ago I sold tools at Sears. Sears had spent
decades building consumer confidence, particularly in their Craftsman brand.
If you bought a Craftsman tool, and it broke for any reason, they replaced it,
sans receipt. As a result, this warranty was transferable - there were no
questions asked. While this policy certainly did not extend to every product
sold at Sears, it did exemplify a commitment to service and quality: in the
words of one older person I talked to once "if you bought it at Sears, you
didn't have to worry."

As time went on, Sears was able to increase profit margins by slowly
restricting the tool warranty, and using crappier parts. The obvious problem
was that once Sears lost its reputation as a "you don't have to worry about
it" store, it had to compete with stores like Wal-Mart on price[0].

The interesting problem here is not the Sears strategy, but the fact that it
takes years for the effect of reduced quality to become obvious: in the short
term, consumer confidence in the brand is still high, so the worse products
are bought for the same prices, under the assumption that the quality is still
high. By the time consumers on the average figure this out (when your drill
wears down in 3 years instead of 10), someone that made the change has been
able to demonstrate clear savings to the company and move on.

Several people have suggested solutions. The first one I hear thrown around is
"get rid of executives." I think this is shortsighted in the same way that
getting rid of a good IT department is. Certainly some executives are useless,
but "get rid of the bad executives" is vacuous. A more compelling solution is
to create incentive structures that encourage "bad executives" to be good
ones, such as incentives which outweigh the short-term gains gotten by
reducing, say, IT spending. For instance, I've heard it suggested that
companies use long-term equity, say 15 years out. I'm not sure how that
squares with moving from company to company, but it's interesting.

[0]This is not to say that the Sears quality-first business model was
sustainable, merely that there was certainly a tradeoff, the effects of which
take a long time to see in total.

~~~
martincmartin
_In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience
is clear._

Things like time developers spend doing traditional IT tasks are clear to
developers. But it's amazing how little of that is visible to executives. They
certainly don't get an hour-by-hour breakdown of where developers spend their
time. And the time to develop software is notoriously difficult to estimate
even using the best techniques out there -- and most people just eyeball it.
So executives really can't quantify the loss of productivity, they just hear
programmers bitching.

~~~
GFischer
The problem there is that the CIO or equivalent isn't making these things
clear to the rest of the executives.

------
patio11
As fun as getting out our tribal aversion to managers who don't respect geeks
is, let's focus on the actionable career point: do not work for cost centers.

~~~
tomjen3
Or better. Turn the perception of being a cost center into being a producer.

Most managers wouldn't dare tuch you so long as you say for every dollar put
into the department, we save the business x dollars. You could even argue the
margins too.

~~~
SatvikBeri
A similar tack is to get yourself perceived as an incremental value adder, as
opposed someone filling a role.

For example, IT is generally seen as filling a set of necessary roles where
each person is more or less interchangeable. Sales is generally seen as
incremental value adds, and sales people get paid accordingly.

So how can you get seen as an incremental value adder if you're working in IT?
Simple: start projects and clearly explain the impact to the bottom line. If
you show the executives that you've saved the company $2MM/year forever, and
that project wouldn't have happened if you hadn't dreamed it up, that's going
to get recognized. Even at large, highly bureaucratic companies.

------
cstross
Also: good management is like oxygen -- you only really notice it, much less
recognize that you need it, when it goes away.

~~~
emeraldd
Bad management is like mud. It get's on everything and is almost impossible to
get rid of.

------
gabrielf
A real life example:

In the last ten years Connecticut Light & Power made major cut backs on
trimming the trees near its power lines. The state got slammed by a huge
snowstorm last Holloween and a huge portion of the state lost power - for as
long as 10 days. Not only did CL&P suffer a financial and public relations
disaster in the aftermath of the storm, they decided to double their tree-
trimming budget for the next year. But this just led to further problems -
people who weren't used to the power company coming in with chainsaws created
a fuss at town meetings about CL&P removing or damaging their trees, leading
to more ongoing PR problems.

------
Foy
I've read in multiple places and wholeheartedly agree that it's important to
focus on visibility in your work.

If your managers can barely describe what you do, or how you do it, then your
job is just asking to be cut.

When I show my clients an update, I always focus on what "looks" or "feels"
different with the user experience. I wouldn't (maybe couldn't even) convey
the awesomeness of all my fandangled SQL subqueries.

------
Dn_Ab
I am brought to mind a quote by a god like galaxy: " _When you do things
right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all._ "

~~~
fallenpegasus
For a long time, that was my email sig.

Then I realized the problem with it.

Now I still try to do things right, and then try to make sure that a few key
people knew what happened.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Step 1 is to start bragging.

Step 2 is to have other people brag about you.

------
elptacek
In a somewhat related adventure, I am scheduled to give a talk soon (hopefully
the same talk twice) about managing a security assessment project. I am
hearing about this same sort of beheading happening in the infosec departments
from various clients. The impact on me, personally, is that my client contacts
are stretched so thin that they don't have cycles to prepare and make the best
use of my time. I'm planning to have handouts with checklists. So this topic
has been very much on my mind, lately.

One of the things I've learned from Tom is to keep track of how I spend my
time. It is tedious and frustrating, but not unlike dieting: without data, you
just have no proof. If I had found myself in the situation that the OP
describes, my first reaction would have been to keep a running log of every
task I had done, including start/stop time and a description of the work done.
I've written scripts to do this in the past that generate PDF timesheets --
you could probably use Trac somehow. I'd keep this stuff on a device I owned,
and bring the logs to my reviews. Yes, this adds to the stress. Yes, you'll
get criticized for it. But when someone who has no clue why the carpets are
always clean starts swinging that axe, you'll be wearing armor.

------
antidoh
I have put this in my very small file of "things to share when I leave."

~~~
andybak
Share it when you're not sure you want to leave. The reaction will tell you
everything you need to know.

------
chrisbennet
A few years ago, my manager at the time explained to me how our company had
acted as an incubator for 2-3 of our competitors. It worked like this: Our
company would design a product over the course of a few years and once it was
in the pipeline (being bought) it would have a life of a few years. More than
once, the then current CEO of the company would decide to cut the engineering
staff to save money and move on before the next product to fill the pipeline
would be needed i.e. the lack of new products wouldn't show up on the bottom
line for a few years. In the meantime, the talented engineering team (that
they layed off) would go out and start another company to compete with us....

------
ricardobeat
Everytime I see a "for folks from HN" message at the top of a post I feel like
I'm part of a school trip. Can we stop littering the web with these?

------
greedo
Efficiency rarely correlates with headcount and budget. 9 years ago, our IT
budget was $11 million. Today, it's a hair over $60 million. Adjusting for
inflation, we should be around 13 million.

Most of the added budget has gone to bloated off the shelf software
applications, retaining duplicate/redundant staffing from a pseudo-merger, and
mismanaged consultants.

The OP has added a lot of facts in replies in this post, indicating that his
staff was relatively lean (1 staffer for every 50 users).

But be careful in drawing too many conclusions from one instance of anectdata.

------
blackcoat
I just started a new job two weeks ago, meaning that I've put in approx 80
hours in. I would guess that I was unable to perform my required functions for
about 30 of those, due to setup inefficiencies. This has also delayed the
onboard learning curve, because I have to stop and figure out who to talk to
to get permissions, or wait for a machine, or an image, or whatnot BEFORE I
could start figuring out how to do whatever it was I was trying to do.

------
bconway
It sounds to me (and I know this won't be a popular opinion here) that the
original IT department was overstaffed. A printer never out of paper? No
projector ever found with a dead bulb?

Much like there being a "healthy" amount of unemployment (~3%, I recall?),
there's a healthy amount of smaller items not met. It sounds like the company
was overpaying for IT.

~~~
emeraldd
What would you say about a building maintenance team that left 3% of the burnt
out/bad light bulbs around? Most of the stuff he's talking about can be
monitored and caught before they become a real problem or dealt with as soon
as they are discovered. (Projector bulbs have expected lifetime, network
printers can tell you when they're out of paper, etc.) To me, it just sounds
like they have solid monitoring and procedures in place for preventative
maintenance.

------
ChuckMcM
Techstop. That's all I'm going to say.

------
michaelochurch
Executives are day traders. I've known day traders to argue that they make
more money trading in the first and last 30 minutes of the day than they do if
they're trading all day, because they end up getting involved in "boredom
trading" that is break-even at best (and blows out their variance) and quite
possibly losing. As for executives, they're disciplined, they can enjoy their
easy jobs and high compensation and accept the boredom associated with rarely
being needed, because if things are running well, they aren't operationally
necessary. Unfortunately, they're rarely content to work 2 hours per day at
their cushy jobs. They become forces of nature due to a combination of (a) a
need to feel active and important, and (b) a theater in which it's hard for
them to have real positive impact (because performance assessment of
executives is impossible and most just don't have the talent).

"Trading boredom" sets in. The executive's job is to Make Decisions and to
gamble with the company culture and operations. In order to feel useful,
executives pull this shit. Like "saving money" by gutting the IT organization.

What's worst about this is that the executives who do this sort of thing
rarely suffer any consequences. They shift blame to subordinates whom they can
fire, and if the heat is turned up on them, they move on to other jobs. The
employees and the owners get fucked, but executives get to flit about from one
cushy job to another on account of building a web of connections that makes
them effectively invincible.

~~~
Foy
I hear nightmarish stories of micro-managers all the time. They feel that in
order to do their jobs they have to tweak EVERYTHING that crosses their desk.

One memorable anecdote I came across was about an animation artist who was in
charge of animating the queen for a 3d chess game. Because he knew his
manager's weakness he threw in a duck... Yes, a duck. Fully animated with
sound effects and everything.

Sure enough, when he showed his work to his manager he said "It's perfect, but
get rid of the duck."

So maybe the moral of this lesson is that when things are running 100%
smoothly, it's wise to toss your micro-manager a bone by doing something
intentionally a little wrong to give them something to meddle with. ;-)

~~~
Dobbs
The duck story is battle chess:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?title=Talk:Battle_Chess#The_duck)

I've often had the opposite problem: companies where the CEO is so
disconnected from the company (usually by working remotely 80% of the time)
that the company doesn't have direction and languishes.

~~~
rmc
Speaking of managers ignoring things, I'm reminded of the last episode of the
90s sci-fi tv show 'Sliders', apparently the producers thought the network
exec werent reading the scripts, so they deliberately broke a rule, and wrote
a scene where someone was shot in the head and it wasn't picked up on.

cf. <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders#section_2>

------
zcvosdfdgj
He never says what the company is or what it does.

After IT was cut, he says it would take a week before a computer was on their
desk.

That sounds bad. But we have no idea what the company does, so we don't
actually know if this is a problem or not.

Look, every division is not critical, and sometimes that division is IT.

We have no idea how much the inefficiency costs or how much was saved by the
cuts. So we have no idea if this was a bad OR good thing for the company.

~~~
emeraldd
> That sounds bad. But we have no idea what the company does, so we don't
> actually know if this is a problem or not.

That's true. The description of the company does lend itself to the belief
that it was sufficiently large enough to make these things a problem. If you
have people working in cubicles there is, more than likely, a need for them to
have a computer, phone, etc. While it might be possible for them to not those
tools, I would expect a different style of working environment if office work
were not a significant component of their job.

> We have no idea how much the inefficiency costs or how much was saved by the
> cuts. So we have no idea if this was a bad OR good thing for the company.

From the sounds of things, they didn't have a problem with inefficiency prior
to the cuts. It sounds very much like they had just the right number of just
the right people on hand to keep things running smoothly. At that point, it's
like you have an engine and decide, I really don't need all this oil, let's
get rid of some of it. You might be spend less on the oil but then you have to
deal with the increased wear on the rest of your engine or risk having it
seize up completely.

Yeah, we don't know the real size of the company or what the company did but,
the kinds of things he's describing will lead to a degradation of overall
morale and you'll find that "broken window syndrome" starts taking over.
You'll find that the IT people hate everyone and that everyone start's hating
IT which makes the whole situation worse.

So the question is, do you save a little money now to find you have a massive
expense in lingering in the future?

~~~
zcvosdfdgj
_From the sounds of things, they didn't have a problem with inefficiency prior
to the cuts._

He includes no details about the IT staffing levels in the company, what the
budget was, the size of the company, what the company did, what the employees
did, the reason for the cuts (other than speculation), or anything else.

For all we know, it was a company with 5 non-IT employees, and a staff of 50
IT people who flipped a coin once a day to decide which of 1 of them was going
to work that day.

Prove me wrong. How many people were in the IT dept? What was their budget?
What did the company do?

You have no idea.. because there are no details in the article. So you do not
have enough information to say if there was an efficiency problem.

~~~
fallenpegasus
A company of about 400 total on-site staff, about 8ish internal IT staff
before, and 3 internal IT staff after.

FOAD, Hope that Helps, Have a Nice Day.

~~~
emeraldd
8ish is significantly less than I was expecting. My hat's off to them for
keeping things running so smoothly!

~~~
keithpeter
8 to 400 just keeping a system going (assumed MS from the vocabulary in the
original article) sounds like a reasonable metric to me assuming no big
business application development. 3 to 400 sounds very small, especially if
there needs to be a Windows roll out (e.g. xp -> 7).

Disclaimer: I'm an observant end user who has worked in organisations ranging
from 70 to 1200 staff total, and who has seen huge differences in basic it
function. As others have pointed out, the cost of the less efficient IT
support is 'hidden' in other budgets and in people 'just getting on with it'.
I've seen newly appointed people share logins with established people just to
be able to _do_ anything which is an obvious security problem. My current
employers have noticeably good IT support, but need to make savings, so I am
worried.

