it wouldn't be so funny except that it's probably true...
Dustin Williams wrote:
> 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?
>>
>>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 01 2009 - 01:46:39 EDT