"The carpets are so clean, we don't need janitors"

In this case, the downside to saving money by laying off expensive experience is clear. Unfortunately, the downsides are rarely clear before the upsides, and by the time the mistake is obvious, returning to the previous state is difficult, and an incentive has been created for short term savings at the expense of long term ones.

By way of example, several years ago I sold tools at Sears. Sears had spent decades building consumer confidence, particularly in their Craftsman brand. If you bought a Craftsman tool, and it broke for any reason, they replaced it, sans receipt. As a result, this warranty was transferable - there were no questions asked. While this policy certainly did not extend to every product sold at Sears, it did exemplify a commitment to service and quality: in the words of one older person I talked to once "if you bought it at Sears, you didn't have to worry."

As time went on, Sears was able to increase profit margins by slowly restricting the tool warranty, and using crappier parts. The obvious problem was that once Sears lost its reputation as a "you don't have to worry about it" store, it had to compete with stores like Wal-Mart on price[0].

The interesting problem here is not the Sears strategy, but the fact that it takes years for the effect of reduced quality to become obvious: in the short term, consumer confidence in the brand is still high, so the worse products are bought for the same prices, under the assumption that the quality is still high. By the time consumers on the average figure this out (when your drill wears down in 3 years instead of 10), someone that made the change has been able to demonstrate clear savings to the company and move on.

Several people have suggested solutions. The first one I hear thrown around is "get rid of executives." I think this is shortsighted in the same way that getting rid of a good IT department is. Certainly some executives are useless, but "get rid of the bad executives" is vacuous. A more compelling solution is to create incentive structures that encourage "bad executives" to be good ones, such as incentives which outweigh the short-term gains gotten by reducing, say, IT spending. For instance, I've heard it suggested that companies use long-term equity, say 15 years out. I'm not sure how that squares with moving from company to company, but it's interesting.

[0]This is not to say that the Sears quality-first business model was sustainable, merely that there was certainly a tradeoff, the effects of which take a long time to see in total.

As fun as getting out our tribal aversion to managers who don't respect geeks is, let's focus on the actionable career point: do not work for cost centers.

Also: good management is like oxygen -- you only really notice it, much less recognize that you need it, when it goes away.

A real life example:

In the last ten years Connecticut Light & Power made major cut backs on trimming the trees near its power lines. The state got slammed by a huge snowstorm last Holloween and a huge portion of the state lost power - for as long as 10 days. Not only did CL&P suffer a financial and public relations disaster in the aftermath of the storm, they decided to double their tree-trimming budget for the next year. But this just led to further problems - people who weren't used to the power company coming in with chainsaws created a fuss at town meetings about CL&P removing or damaging their trees, leading to more ongoing PR problems.

I've read in multiple places and wholeheartedly agree that it's important to focus on visibility in your work.

If your managers can barely describe what you do, or how you do it, then your job is just asking to be cut.

When I show my clients an update, I always focus on what "looks" or "feels" different with the user experience. I wouldn't (maybe couldn't even) convey the awesomeness of all my fandangled SQL subqueries.

I am brought to mind a quote by a god like galaxy: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

In a somewhat related adventure, I am scheduled to give a talk soon (hopefully the same talk twice) about managing a security assessment project. I am hearing about this same sort of beheading happening in the infosec departments from various clients. The impact on me, personally, is that my client contacts are stretched so thin that they don't have cycles to prepare and make the best use of my time. I'm planning to have handouts with checklists. So this topic has been very much on my mind, lately.

One of the things I've learned from Tom is to keep track of how I spend my time. It is tedious and frustrating, but not unlike dieting: without data, you just have no proof. If I had found myself in the situation that the OP describes, my first reaction would have been to keep a running log of every task I had done, including start/stop time and a description of the work done. I've written scripts to do this in the past that generate PDF timesheets -- you could probably use Trac somehow. I'd keep this stuff on a device I owned, and bring the logs to my reviews. Yes, this adds to the stress. Yes, you'll get criticized for it. But when someone who has no clue why the carpets are always clean starts swinging that axe, you'll be wearing armor.

I have put this in my very small file of "things to share when I leave."

A few years ago, my manager at the time explained to me how our company had acted as an incubator for 2-3 of our competitors. It worked like this: Our company would design a product over the course of a few years and once it was in the pipeline (being bought) it would have a life of a few years. More than once, the then current CEO of the company would decide to cut the engineering staff to save money and move on before the next product to fill the pipeline would be needed i.e. the lack of new products wouldn't show up on the bottom line for a few years. In the meantime, the talented engineering team (that they layed off) would go out and start another company to compete with us....

Everytime I see a "for folks from HN" message at the top of a post I feel like I'm part of a school trip. Can we stop littering the web with these?

Efficiency rarely correlates with headcount and budget. 9 years ago, our IT budget was $11 million. Today, it's a hair over $60 million. Adjusting for inflation, we should be around 13 million.

Most of the added budget has gone to bloated off the shelf software applications, retaining duplicate/redundant staffing from a pseudo-merger, and mismanaged consultants.

The OP has added a lot of facts in replies in this post, indicating that his staff was relatively lean (1 staffer for every 50 users).

But be careful in drawing too many conclusions from one instance of anectdata.

I just started a new job two weeks ago, meaning that I've put in approx 80 hours in. I would guess that I was unable to perform my required functions for about 30 of those, due to setup inefficiencies. This has also delayed the onboard learning curve, because I have to stop and figure out who to talk to to get permissions, or wait for a machine, or an image, or whatnot BEFORE I could start figuring out how to do whatever it was I was trying to do.

It sounds to me (and I know this won't be a popular opinion here) that the original IT department was overstaffed. A printer never out of paper? No projector ever found with a dead bulb?

Much like there being a "healthy" amount of unemployment (~3%, I recall?), there's a healthy amount of smaller items not met. It sounds like the company was overpaying for IT.

Techstop. That's all I'm going to say.

Executives are day traders. I've known day traders to argue that they make more money trading in the first and last 30 minutes of the day than they do if they're trading all day, because they end up getting involved in "boredom trading" that is break-even at best (and blows out their variance) and quite possibly losing. As for executives, they're disciplined, they can enjoy their easy jobs and high compensation and accept the boredom associated with rarely being needed, because if things are running well, they aren't operationally necessary. Unfortunately, they're rarely content to work 2 hours per day at their cushy jobs. They become forces of nature due to a combination of (a) a need to feel active and important, and (b) a theater in which it's hard for them to have real positive impact (because performance assessment of executives is impossible and most just don't have the talent).

"Trading boredom" sets in. The executive's job is to Make Decisions and to gamble with the company culture and operations. In order to feel useful, executives pull this shit. Like "saving money" by gutting the IT organization.

What's worst about this is that the executives who do this sort of thing rarely suffer any consequences. They shift blame to subordinates whom they can fire, and if the heat is turned up on them, they move on to other jobs. The employees and the owners get fucked, but executives get to flit about from one cushy job to another on account of building a web of connections that makes them effectively invincible.

He never says what the company is or what it does.

After IT was cut, he says it would take a week before a computer was on their desk.

That sounds bad. But we have no idea what the company does, so we don't actually know if this is a problem or not.

Look, every division is not critical, and sometimes that division is IT.

We have no idea how much the inefficiency costs or how much was saved by the cuts. So we have no idea if this was a bad OR good thing for the company.