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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

There is something about this that I'd like to be able to communicate better [0]:

Organizations are made of teams. That sounds super obvious, but it means that any change request is going to go to a team (or teams).

From the outside, it looks like a corporation has effectively unlimited resources; on the inside, any particular team has very limited resources. The team may have just been downsized, lost a lead, been reorganized, etc.

0: Better than I currently can, not better than Patrick.

Funny quote:

> That retail user is extremely unsophisticated about the bank account, finance in general, and frequently many other things in life.

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Large organizations are made of "money saving entities".

I work with a lot of large corporations and we have constant problems with the software I support because the imperative is to continually drop operational costs. We'll have a team we work with that is well trained, understand the software well, and keeps the software working at near 100% capacity.

Then suddenly one day they are all gone and you get the offshoring team that knows nothing about the specialist software they are attempting to support, if they have the capability to actually turn a computer on is surprising. Software availability drops significantly having direct impact on deliveries, costing god knows how much in some of these companies. Support on the vendor side (my side) turns into a huge expensive mess because now you're now writing instructions to the level of "when you take a poopy, remember to flush and pull your pants back up".

> Large organizations are made of "money saving entities".

Working for a cost center vs. a profit center will make a huge difference in your professional life.

Not everyone is wired for a sales&marketing job, and twisting themselves to fit in that role would also make a huge difference in life, in a more Faustian kind of way.

There are companies that don't view Development work as the "cost" center for the business, but much more directly as the "Profit" center of the business. This is not necessarily the norm, and certainly not in certain industries like Education or especially Hospitals, or Law where IT are basically seen as second class citizens (however well they may be compensated).

I feel it's very much not the norm, except for early-stage tech startups, and companies that use software directly to print money - which more often than I'd like means adtech or gambling. All the "useful" or "worthwhile" activities, in the traditional, social sense, tend to be cost centers.

Now, without passing too much judgement, I'm starting to feel the unease comes straight from the cost/profit center distinction, as another way to define it is: profit center is what you do to get the money, so you can spend it on the cost center. The former is more exposed to market pressures, thus more likely to evolve into something ugly.

I simply cannot upvote this enough.

I also believe this is a hard problem to solve. The partitioning of an organization's resources into teams is inherently messy and inefficient. One has to consider internal politics, egos of middle managers, or preferences of individuals when staffing teams within an organization. The end result is often far from what's the best for the organization overall.

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