I'll admit that I might have been a bit too general (and influenced by https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2

I'll admit that I might have been a bit too general (and influenced by https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) Arguably that's a case of internal competition - the short term gamble will pay off showing you as more competitive, and you're not going to be there for the consequences, are you? That said, I have encountered (more like been in the office when the discussion happened and got rest of the tale) bean counting issues at highest levels of a telco conglomerate where the "international" level was asking why we were spending so much on BTSes, with particular issue being how we stuck sizeable UPSes on them - whose maintenance wasn't cheap. Ultimately it turned out that other national units (this was level of individual, nation-wide european telcos in one multinational) were either doing creative accounting or just skipping on reliability. But because of that, their BTSes looked much cheaper than ours, and we were getting the flack from multinational level.