I just remember thinking, finally, someone with some authority is getting this ball moving.
I just remember thinking, finally, someone with some authority is getting this ball moving.
We needed and had purchased a rather expensive database software license, however, we didn't have the hardware yet to run that database. The guys doing hardware spent MONTHS debating on which $10k piece of hardware they'd pick to run the DB. The DB license cost? Something like $0.5 mill.
As one engineer said to me "I don't care what hardware you guys get, purchase them all! We are wasting god knows how much money on a license we can't use because we don't have the hardware to install it on!"
E.g. I've been in meetings with multiple developers who, if you add up everyone's salary, is well over $1 million/year, debating for way too much time on whether it's worth it to buy a $500/month service to help automate some aspect of devops.
Maybe this wasn't the case for your specific anecdote, but in the scenario I'm describing I got the feeling that a lot of people think about business purchases in the context of their own personal finances rather than in the context of the business's finances. Leading people to be extremely cautious with things like a $10k purchase that would be "expensive" if purchased as an individual and "cheap" if purchased as a company.
In those cases, getting an exec to come in and pull the trigger can help. The exec is used to looking at big picture budgets/strategy, which IC's aren't. (Although I'm sure someone here can come up with another anecdote proving that wrong)
Every so often my company would provide lunches for the developers. However, they didn't want to spend too much money doing this. So how did they resolve it? They put together a committee of devs to discuss lunch options/etc. Easily 1+million/year of salary in one room debating whether we do Jimmy Johns or McDonalds and how they'd get the food to the office.
For $2000, you can get some pretty nice catering for 100 people. But like you said, people just seem bad at thinking of that sort of big picture.
I find that still happens organically in smaller companies without, but in larger companies things trend towards more clique like behaviour without it (caveat small sample size)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-cafeteri...
https://taxnews.ey.com/news/2019-0493-employer-must-substant...
"Snacks
The TAM separately considers whether the value of snacks provided to employees is excludable from income under Section 119. Rather than revisit the business reasons previously analyzed, the TAM relies on Tougher v. Commissioner, 441 F.2d 1148 (9th Cir. 1971), to determine that the snacks are not meals. Accordingly, a snack cannot be a meal furnished for the convenience of the employer. Nevertheless, the TAM does conclude that the value of the snacks is excludable from employee income as de minimis fringe benefits under Section 132(e)(1)."
Meanwhile, there is an accountant somewhere that thinks he's a genius for keeping the hardware budget in check.
It's super important to consider the human cost and opportunity cost of each decision, and it's scaling characteristics.
Eg: spending $20+k on a ci system like circleci, GitHub actions, whatever might feel like a big purchase, but if you consider that split by the number of developers using it, their salaries, and that in general it scales with your head count rather than user count suddenly it's pretty attractive.
On the other hand some other seemingly small (unit) cost that applies per user of your product might be worth optimizing/eliminating as that can have a big impact on your margins - but even then you need to balance it against opportunity cost. We could increase margins by x% with y investment, or increase revenue by z doing something else where the delta of revenue outweighs the better margins.
Basically it's a big juggling act involving numbers that we're not used to dealing with in our personal finance and you need to ground your thinking in terms scaling characteristics and the companies overall revenue/burn to appreciate what actually moves the needle.
A crap boss is one that doesn't make choices, a good boss is one that does, a great boss is one that makes sure that the best of the possible choices is made giving the data at hand.
Having careers and heads depending on making the wrong choice just pushed to paralysis.