Think about it this way, if a team of 10 engineers came up with 10
ideas in a year and each one was paid $50,000 in annual salary then
each idea would have cost the company $50,000. Assuming it's a team of
good engineers then one of those 10 ideas would have actually been a
good one so if they had only used that one idea it would have cost
$500,000. The cost per idea of that one idea would be too much for
their manager to be able to explain to the executives and more than
the executives could explain to the board so they would have to make
budget cuts to lower the cost per idea settling on a reasonable
$50,000 per good idea which would mean canning nine of the engineers.
You would hope that only the best and most competent engineer would
still be employed, but since it's a team effort the person with the
most charisma and often the least skill would be the one who got all
the credit and all the more capable engineers would be fired, leaving
someone capable of 1/20th of the work of the team as a whole, but
factoring in the collaborative synergistic efforts of the team, he
would more likely be capable of 1/40th of the work, so at this rate it
would take the one engineer left in the department 40 years to come up
with one good idea.
The lack of results would be something that the managers would view as
unacceptable and after one year with no good ideas, i.e. an annualized
infinite cost per good idea, the lone engineer would be fired and
replaced by someone who graduated from college two years before but
couldn't find work as an engineer and was suck working at Taco Bell.
This new employee would accept a paid internship at $30,000 with the
promise of a permanent job if her produced one good idea. The manager
is thinking of the joy of getting a $30,000 cost per good idea which
would result in a $20,000 saving and translate into a $10,000 bonus
for the manager. Unfortunately the dumbass would design something that
looked really cool but was totally useless and ultimately would result
in the deaths of dozens of customers which would lead to several class
action law suits that would bankrupt the company and it would be sold
at auction to a conglomerate of Russian mob bosses from St. Petersburg
and Chinese free market communists from Shanghai who would use the
company as a front to build a robot army to overthrow the west.
So in the long run it is cheaper for the business and in the interests
of national security to implement those annoying bad ideas.
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 8:30 PM, David Gersic <info@zaccaria-pinball.com> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 10 March 2009 04:38 pm, Ray Block wrote:
>> Couldn't agree more, Jon. My experience with company engineers indicates
>> they feel the need to reinvent the wheel frequently to preserve their jobs.
>
> Yet they rarely seem to hit on a good idea that would actually improve
> something, eh?
>
>
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