3 ms·

Dan Luu has an article titled exactly the same: https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/

• eadmund 8y ago
  > There's the company where I worked on a four person effort with a multi-hundred million dollar budget and a billion dollar a year impact, where requests for things that cost hundreds of dollars routinely took months or were denied. I’m so used to seeing this, but I still don’t get it. Seriously, we spend $X/week on some nice-but-unnecessary luxury, but won’t spend $X/16 once for some really useful thing. I suspect that it has to do with how corporate budgets are designed, but … maybe they could be designed better?
  • pjc50 8y ago
    Power and control. It's rarely quite so concrete, but because money is so countable and is explicitly subject to control that it is seen most keenly. Most companies will have some sort of "financial controller" role, and it all flows downhill from there. It's where the false positive / false negative phenomenon comes in, too. The person doing the controlling has an incentive to reject as many requests as possible, because they get criticised for any retroactively identified as "waste" - but they don't get to see, and can't count, all the time wasted dealing with the process and opportunities lost as a result. I once worked for a small company that would let you buy anything under £100 on the company card so long as you sent in an explanation by the end of the month, preferably identifying a client it could be billed to. This worked very well because when you put "£100k engineer time, £10k custom electronics, £10 misc stationary" on the same invoice no sane person is going to question the stationary.