The other half of "Artists Ship"

I disagree with the claim that harm to the U.S. IPO market was "not the intention" of the "people who wrote" Sarbanes-Oxley.

I have two pieces of evidence.

First, it was well-known and easy to see that Sarbanes-Oxley would be extremely expensive. It was well-known when passed that its costs fall disproportionately on small public companies. Because IPOs by definition are small public companies, the costs fall disproportionately on them. Thus, it must have been known when enacted that the bill would harm IPOs.

Second, suppose in fact it is the case, as Graham seems to advocate, that Congress "inadvertently" harmed IPOs. His argument is that Congress just accidently happened to overlook the harm of the bill to IPOs. In that case, when the harm to IPOs became factually clear, the bill would have been changed or amended. The fact that the law was not amended even after the harm to IPOs became clear proves that it was Congress' intention all along to harm small public companies (the companies most dangerous to the large corporations who have the most lobbying pull).

It seems that checks affect journalism too. "Citizen journalism" allows people to report much more quickly than traditional media. Bloggers don't have to submit their posts to editors and fact-checkers, the way broadcast and print journalists do.

The flip side is that if an employee does generate that much income in one year, a large company isn't set up to reward it.

Case in point: I work for a $3Bn company and a year ago I developed a feature that saved the business ~$2M that year. We know the amount because when the problem raised its head we called together a number of people to calculate what the cost would be and estimates were between $1.5M - $3.5M if we couldn't find a solution. Not loss of revenue, but we would have actually had to pay out that much in support costs. The problem was highly visible across the organization and I was able to find a way to solve the it in a way that was completely invisible to the customer, implemented it and released to the field. My manager looked good, his manager looked good. I got an "average" performance review. I was pissed and to this day I haven't regained my motivation to do that caliber of work again. I wonder if I ever will without leaving!

There is a related concern I have about costs piling up due to corporate or managerial mandates. I have the impression that people above us only think about what will make their jobs easier -- what else do they need for us to supply them with so that they will be able to achieve predictability, manage or reduce costs, and generally manage the company better. When they come at it from this angle, it always seems reasonable that they ask us to do more -- provide more reports, track time against projects, report metrics -- when in fact most of what they ask actually interferes with us being able to get real work done. Since they/we do not have adequate productivity measurements in place already, the resulting reduction in productivity is never noticed, hence an invisible cost has been added without a conscious decision or cost/benefit analysis. Since I think most individual contributors recognize that this is taking place, it acts as a disincentive.

In the end I think the solution to both the article's and my concerns are the same: It is always better to ask the members of the team that experienced the problem firsthand what they think the solution would be or what they would do differently next time to avoid the problem. Especially if you phrase it as "what could you or your team have done differently to improve the outcome" and urge them to avoid proposing major process initiatives if at all possible, the improvement will be more practical and lower cost in all senses.

Summary:

People like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway.