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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

The article does a good job explaining Vista and their process. I took the intelligence test. It seemed trivial, but I suppose it's better than having nothing.

It very much reminds me of that show The Profit. Fix the books first, so you know where you're really at and what really needs fixing. Cut anything not making money. Focus on scaling the core business. I've seen all of these changes happen or are in progress.

Overall they've done a good job. As an old timer that's seen the good times and the money just spilling out, I can't help but want to grumble when they start cutting the fat, but it all makes perfect business sense.

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"Cut anything not making money," works great when you're a monopoly or your business wasn't built on customer service.

Customer support can easily be a competitive advantage.

I guarantee you that unless your company recently downsized (or is very small) there are things you can cut, because no one cared enough to fix them or they thought it was cool to have X even though X is not returning value.

Slack is an example of this. You report an issue and quickly get a personalized reply.

A million times better that GSuite.

G Suite isn't a help desk and ticketing system.

OP is commending slack for their customer support for when you report an issue with slack itself. Nothing to do with what the products are.

I used to work for company acquired by Vista. What you said is true, but in the end they were just another private equity buyout.

> "Cut anything not making money"

Does this mean unprofitable markets or things like janitors?

Yoga, free food, anything not required to contribute directly to the bottom line.

Where I worked, they had been shrinking through attrition, and there were no longer enough people to occupy two floors of a building. So one day they decided to consolidate on one floor. I had a thought and looked it up - yep, the bathroom was now below the statutory number of toilets per employee.

Of course, that was nothing that couldn't be solved through further attrition.

Small child in business school here - in our vernacular, this means remove lines of business not turning a profit. Many are kept around either in hopes they'll get better or because executives think they round out a basket of offerings and maybe people are more likely to allow us to perform their cancer surgery if they know we also do neonatal surgery. So even though our neonatal unit loses money, let's keep it. The Vista camp here would say - that's a bs theory, let's focus on getting better at what we're good at rather than trying to make a business line profitable we've already spent 5 years demonstrating we don't know how to make profitable.

What about lines of business that are returning a contribution but not a profit?

Projects were cut. They did not touch our benefits in any meaningful way. Take the 40 or so projects that are going on, sort them by profit/cost, and chop the bottom 2/3 off.

They were dumb projects anyway.

I thought the US A didn't tend to use IQ tests for a number of reasons, also IQ tests are gameable.

Also the liberal use of the word debt in the article worries me in the UK there have been a number of scandals where PE buys a company loads it with debt and flogs it to some dozy fund mangers and a few years later it all collapses - Debenhams is one example

if you can game raven’s progressive matrices i’d love to see what that even means

Practice lots of practice

Not even that much. Once I knew what those specific matrices were and how they are usually made, it was so much more straight forward. Immediately crushed all of those.

> I thought the US A didn't tend to use IQ tests for a number of reason

Any employment requirement that produces a disparate impact has to be proven to be reasonably related to job performance. In practice, that probably means some kind of validation study tailored to each specific job catagory. That’s expensive.

> I thought the US A didn't tend to use IQ tests for a number of reasons, also IQ tests are gameable.

The primary reason is that protected minorities score lower than average on IQ tests; without a legitimate business reason to set an IQ cutoff, you can be sued for discriminatory hiring. And because IQ is so granular, you don't want to argue in court that 1 point is a business necessity when you set a threshold of 110, and you reject a minority candidate with a 109 score.

Which college someone went to serves as a decent proxy for min IQ (assuming SAT scores correlate with IQ).

That stops working when minority candidates are admitted with lower SAT scores.

So how come the ones that seem to do well on visa's test come from less stellar backgrounds.

But it's a binary decision -- do they have a degree or not?

Not sure why I got marked down here the Debenhams PE issue I mentioned was reported with more negative slant by the Daily Telegraph (a Right Wing Paper) in its business section.

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