"The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors" • Hacker News Board

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#31

Post by zcvosdfdgj » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:12 PM UTC

rosstafarian wrote: post #24

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, he said the savings almost certainly less than the cost of the waste. This sounds like a guess. He gives no numbers, and doesn't appear to have quantified anything. Second, maybe IT was running so smoothly previously because it was bloated, and was a huge drain on company resources. Maybe it was running smoothly because a bad manager refused to put a limit on anything, leading to a division whos costs were com…

The exact quote is: "Of course, it all went to shit. New employees would go a week before they had machines, phones, passwords, and ACLs. Printers ran out of paper, projectors ran out of lightbulbs, servers ran out of storage, networks got misconfigured, and so forth. The total time lost and wasted across the whole company was most certainly greater than the savings of laying off the expensive and skilled IT staff."…

No, it's clear from the article that he thought the company was worse off.. but really had no details to back it up.

All we know from the article is that IT was worse off. But we have no idea how the company as a whole is doing.

Maybe you aren't aware, but most companies consist of more than the IT dept.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#32

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:12 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #27

michaelochurch wrote: post #2

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 a…

> 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 I'm sorry but you have zero clue as to what running a business is like. Zero. There really isn't much more I can say other than to quote Twain: "He who holds a cat by the tail learns something…

[deleted]

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#33

Post by emeraldd » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #14

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…

> 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?

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#34

Post by zobzu » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:22 PM UTC

temphn wrote: post #23

michaelochurch wrote: post #2

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 a…

Unfortunately, they're rarely content to work 2 hours per day at their cushy jobs. These are not the characteristics of executives at successful companies. Have you ever started a successful business? If so, did you work two hours per day? I doubt many YC founders would see themselves in this assessment.

YC founders and startups have nothing to do with the story IMO. They're generally engineers that make their own companies.

Executives as depicted are however the general standard for most companies. They generally have never created any company from scratch.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#35

Post by zobzu » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:28 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #28

kooshball wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of generalization is toxic. The engineering community as a whole should not accept this mindset of Engineering vs Executives.

It's not that. Good executives are worth far more than the compensation that they get; but as a class, their net impact is neutral at best and probably negative. As with stock traders (where a lot of them just lose money) most of them aren't very competent. That doesn't invalidate every single one of them or what they're trying to do. It's the CEO-pay debate all over again. No one who actually understands large compa…

I see 2 flaws in an otherwise fine argument.

1/ I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are. I sure believe a good CEO should be paid adequately but those are just ridiculous amounts, and the CEO is only one part of the puzzle, even if important. As a CEO its hard to screw up (even thus many do), its hard to be very good, but its easy to be in the middle. Like most jobs in fact.

2/Working 2H a day certainly is an issue. Simply because it doesnt mean you're ultra efficient, obviously. You need more than 2H a day just to be able to talk to people in the company. One shouldn't put extremes like that as they can be misunderstood. It's ok to work 5h-7h a day, or even less some days if you're efficient. But 2H, is just not realistic, you can't even speak that fast.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#36

Post by rayiner » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:32 PM UTC

kooshball wrote: post #25

michaelochurch wrote: post #2

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 a…

This kind of generalization is toxic. The engineering community as a whole should not accept this mindset of Engineering vs Executives.

The executive community is quite on board with the mindset of "engineers are fungible cost-centers to be reduced as much as possible" so why should engineers not be wary themselves?

Engineers being culturally complacent and not willing to make a fuss is precisely why companies like Google, who have revenues per employee twice as high as say Goldman Sachs, get away with paying their engineers a fraction of what financial professionals at Goldman get paid.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#37

Post by zcvosdfdgj » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:34 PM UTC

emeraldd wrote: post #33

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #14

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#38

Post by rayiner » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:36 PM UTC

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #14

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…

There is a strain of thinking evident in the article, and one I think is pervasive in corporate America today, which is that measurable savings are highlighted while difficult to quantify lost benefits are deemphasized.

When you can't precisely measure how much is lost by doing something half-assed, it's probably worthwhile to do it right.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#39

Post by martincmartin » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:39 PM UTC

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #26

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 build…

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.

Re: "The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

#40

Post by rosstafarian » Sat, Aug 04, 2012, 9:45 PM UTC

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #31

rosstafarian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact quote is: "Of course, it all went to shit. New employees would go a week before they had machines, phones, passwords, and ACLs. Printers ran out of paper, projectors ran out of lightbulbs, servers ran out of storage, networks got misconfigured, and so forth. The total time lost and wasted across the whole company was most certainly greater than the savings of laying off the expensive and skilled IT staff."…

No, it's clear from the article that he thought the company was worse off.. but really had no details to back it up. All we know from the article is that IT was worse off. But we have no idea how the company as a whole is doing. Maybe you aren't aware, but most companies consist of more than the IT dept.

The OP does have details to back it up, just not hard numbers. He states how new employees had problems getting setup, old employees dealing with misc problems, things not running smoothly in general. Yes most companies consist of more than IT but these days the problem is many organizations seem to look at IT as an extra expense they can skimp on or even completely do without("The bosses son is really good with computer's he can fix any problems that arise!"). Theres two sides to every story and maybe this department was bloated and could've used some restructuring we don't know that part for sure but we do know that things went from everyone being able to work efficiently to all sorts of random issues, suffered by general employees not IT that should've been avoided.

You're taking this awfully personally, I'll ask again do you do in some sort of managerial position? Do you have some personal experience with this sort of thing?