Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you are getting taxed >100% I never understood why you'd want to throw away money for "tax reasons". Can someone please help me understand this, it always comes up and I feel dumb for not understanding.
Simple example: My FSA card is pre-tax money to be used for healthcare expenses. Towards the end of the year, I ended up still having a balance that would go away if not used, so I bought things that I would not have otherwise purchased.
I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
241–250 of 458 posts
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you are getting taxed >100% I never understood why you'd want to throw away money for "tax reasons". Can someone please help me understand this, it always comes up and I feel dumb for not understanding.
You have to spend X anyway, because the money is pre-tax or non-taxable, you can spend 1.5X-2X, so the extra money is 'free'.
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some organization have this issue where you get a budget for your group, and if you don't use it then upper management will think you don't need more resources next year and will budget less or even cut from your department. If you don't use it, they reallocate it to a department that needs it and you never get it back. Another part is where if you get a hiring budget they expect you to use it because if you aren't s…
You just restated the problem in more detail. What I'm asking is, if the above system encourages managers to waste money, why hasn't anyone come up with a better system?
So the basic inefficiency is that you want to do top-down resource allocation, “I approve of this much budget going to that project.” We could call that bureaucracy, or The State, or whatever. There is a reason that every modern military in the world has this bureaucratic gene: you can track who is responsible for every dollar easily, which limits the scope of corruption. Corruption does not itself kill the other countries: it just places an upper bound on how much money, how many resources that military can effectively put to use. But the militaries who can inefficiently use unbelievable resources clobber the ones who efficiently use fewer, and you get a survival of the fittest thing.
So the basic problem is that bad actors exist within a sufficiently large organization, and the bureaucratic solution incurs the cost of making everybody into bad actors, but with the benefit of limiting the badness of their action by top-down accountability. It is also somewhat bounded in how much it wastes: non-bad-actors who really don’t need their big budgets do have a weak vested interest in allowing it to be cut, as it frees up resources for the organization as a whole and this can improve their job stability, year-end bonus, etc.; also business units that really are not pulling their weight can be reorganized over long time scales. That is bureaucracy in a nutshell, the natural top-down solution.
To solve the corruption problem with a bottom-up approach requires connecting individual interests to organization interests, so that in a game-theoretic sense there are no bad actors (albeit there may be irrational ones who want to hurt themselves in order to hurt society). This is a really hard problem in accounting. The basic thing that you want to do is to make sure that everyone gets paid some baseline amount, plus some proportion of “what they make for the company.” In cases where this is really easy to determine, nobody does it any other way. Salespeople get commissions, and they get them fairly universally. This solves any corruption problem bottom-up. [It is also 100% transparent: “Why did she earn more than you? Because she sold more than you”—top-down budgets are frequently confidential wherever possible due to the risk of one subunit (could be larger than an employee) discovering that another subunit which “does less” in whatever sense gets more of the pie.]
The problem is, we occupy complicated systems and it is not easy to determine how much the organization’s bottom line will be impacted by the loss of a particular individual. What is the “commission” that I should be paying to a janitor? Am I supposed to pay developers money for completing “story points?” And how do I do that without creating a toxic atmosphere where everybody wants to overestimate the number of story points in a task—how do I objectively measure those story points in terms of the hard cashy business value they create? What about managers or recruiters; how do I reward you for the business value of the people you managed/recruited?
Without solving this sort of hard problem, you can’t guarantee that when someone uses nepotism to the organization’s great loss, that they don’t feel the full brunt of that loss and therefore have a selfish incentive to be fair in the first place.
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to spend X anyway, because the money is pre-tax or non-taxable, you can spend 1.5X-2X, so the extra money is 'free'.
I'm with peteradio, I also never understand this line of reasoning. Let's say the company has earned 1,000$ and the tax rate is 50%. Your expenses X are 100$. So 1,000$ - 100$ = 900$. Of which 50% (450$) are tax and 50% (450$) are profit. Now double X to 200$: Then 1,000$ - 200$ = 800$. Of which 50% (400$) are tax and 50% (400$) are profit. That means your profit is 50$ lower (400$ instead of 450$) then if you hadn't…
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the issue is management unwilling to trust other levels of management to make the call when they need money / a strong desire some folks have to filter / make decisions for others. I don't know what the fix is for that except to take a chance and trust folks but ... it doesn't seem to be a thing and instead they come up with easy systems to just make arbitrary decisions and there ya go. It boggles my mind som…
The problem is the further down you go the more narrow the focus. When I worked on MS Office I was always annoyed they were spending all the money on other products with few users and no revenue. After all we were the ones taking in the dollars. Of course at an organizational level it was understood they need to invest in the next big thing even if it’s not making money right now.
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, "charge accordingly" means different things to different customers. My parents never advertised their tailor shop, it was all "word-of-mouth" business. After the pricing jack-up, every customer got charged what my mother felt they could pay (with a very loose regard for consistency and some allowance for negotiation). I used to think that was sketchy. It wasn't until much later that I realized that B2B enterpris…
> I used to think that was sketchy. It wasn't until much later that I realized that B2B enterprise sales people do that stuff ALL THE TIME even with their onerous kpi's, forecasting and fiscal quarter expectations! Depending on how it's done, it still is, and enterprise salesmen doing it doesn't make it less so. As a customer, I don't necessarily seek absolute minimum price, but I want it to be a fair price that I ca…
> I don't want to be subject of a bunch of manipulative sales techniques...
If the sales techniques are sufficiently manipulative, you won't actually know you're being manipulated.There's a reason why sales people in enterprise sales can pull in MM's per year, it's a different level than, say, retail or car sales.
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how people choose which health insurance policy is offered by their employer, or which private company won the contract to deliver their electricity.
You're right, at least in the case of highly regulated markets and when the state creates artificial monopolies (e.g. electricity). I'll correct my original comment then: At least private companies that compete in a relatively free market are losing their own earned money when they're inefficient, not someone else's.
Private companies are losing money on behalf of their owners or shareholders.
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#248Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on how burned your boss has been. For a while finance departments just paid invoices without question. It was a lot cheaper than what we have now. Then someone in finance did an audit of a routine invoice (a random thing to show a junior how it could be done if requested) and discovered the "services rendered" on the invoice was just sending an invoice - no other work was being done. Now the company spends a…
I'm sure there was plenty of this sort of fraud occurring in the 1950s and such, but technology has enabled this sort of thing a lot lately. Not quite the same but closely related, the "email from the 'CEO' explaining why you need to wire money to this numeric account" is a huge and very profitable scam right now. That stunt may have been possible 50 years ago, but modern scale, tools like LinkedIn making it easy to…
Re: I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
#250I know someone working as a contractor for a big company. 1 year contract. 6 months have gone by and they've done ... nothing. Their boss keeps saying "Don't worry we'll get to you, we're just swamped right now, you're good." They're already talking about extending the contract.