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

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

#51

Post by emeraldd »

bconway wrote: post #48

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.

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.

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

#52

Post by lancewiggs »

praptak wrote: post #11
cperciva wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the same advice applied to PhD theses: Examiners always want to change something , so leave something in which you won't mind having them tell you to change.

I have witnessed this advice applied to contract drafts. Lawyers from the other company were routinely given some bullshit clauses to prove their usefulness in vetting the contract.

The really entertaining part is when they don't catch them. Every clause is negotiable - don't leave it to your lawyers alone to negotiate.

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

#53

Post by zcvosdfdgj »

emeraldd wrote: post #50
zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You're right on that, we don't have any idea about the total size of the department or the total size of the company as a whole. So, I'll grant you that there might have been some room for cuts in the department but, that really doesn't matter…

I am making what I would consider educated guess on the scale of the organization and the impact of the changes.

WHAT?! You're making a guess based on what? THERE WERE NO DETAILS. It's impossible for that to be an educated guess.

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

#54

Post by 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.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

emeraldd wrote: post #50
zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You're right on that, we don't have any idea about the total size of the department or the total size of the company as a whole. So, I'll grant you that there might have been some room for cuts in the department but, that really doesn't matter…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by emeraldd »

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #53
emeraldd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're right on that, we don't have any idea about the total size of the department or the total size of the company as a whole. So, I'll grant you that there might have been some room for cuts in the department but, that really doesn't matter…

I am making what I would consider educated guess on the scale of the organization and the impact of the changes. WHAT?! You're making a guess based on what? THERE WERE NO DETAILS. It's impossible for that to be an educated guess.

> It's impossible for that to be an educated guess.

It would be impossible if I had never worked in IT or support organization. Otherwise I don't see how you could conclude that. While my knowledge of the specific situation is limited, we have to assume there is some degree of sanity to it. (If there weren't, I would expect to be reading something more likely to appear on the daily WTF than on here.) Taking an educated guess is inherently something you do based on a blending of limited information about a situation and a combination of you're own experience.

Granted, the information here is limited, its meant to illustrate a point, not rail against any particular perpetrator. Discounting the point because you don't know all the details doesn't make sense. The details are in how you apply the point.

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

#58

Post by fallenpegasus »

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #20
michaelochurch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things were running well. The executive thought that IT was bloated and made cuts. Things were no longer running well. Far more money was lost in the company's dysfunction than saved by the cuts. Sounds like a bad executive to me. I never implied that there aren't good managers and executives, but only that most of them aren't, because most of them get caught up in "boredom trading" that doesn't solve problems, but i…

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…

I'm the OP. After few years of bad IT hell, the rest of the company was almost completely dead in the water, in part because of the bad IT drag, and in part because of other management decisions that had bad outcomes. I then left when it was gutted with layoffs. A few years after that, it was sold for pennies on the dollar prices to a low-quality technology aggregration company.

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

#59

Post by fallenpegasus »

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.

A few years later, the company itself was effectively dead.

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

#60

Post by fallenpegasus »

zcvosdfdgj wrote: post #41
rosstafarian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

The OP does have details to back it up ... employees had problems getting setup Ok.. tell me about those employees. How much do they get paid? Minimum wage? What do they do? Do they even require a desk? A week to setup a desk that the employee doesn't even need because they are required to travel constantly is not a problem. You're taking this awfully personally I'm not taking any of this personally. You're just sens…

I'm the OP.

The employees were expensive software developers, electrical engineers, RF signal electrical engineers, and microelectronics design engineers. There probably was one person making minwage. She was a very sweet developmentally disabled girl who delivered the mail to our desks.

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