2 ms·
Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will print money next year, so based on thi
by vasco 2y ago
Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will print money next year, so based on this prediction I will raise the budget for the FY. Then when the prediction of revenue fails, you do cuts, oh well you were wrong. But next year you can do the same thing. Game theory wise this works because if you're right, you bet big, hire big, are ahead next year vs your competitors that invested less. If it goes wrong you are seen as a serious executive that has the courage to have layoffs when needed, and if your market is ebbing your competitors will also be suffering somewhat.
It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.
- bodegajed 2y agoThis happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.
- marcosdumay 2y agoOh, those hyperspecialized employees that can only work in one project and could never do the exact same thing if the thing's goal changed... And yeah, those quick to materialize gains, where the manager can easily discover if a project worked within the same fiscal year... Also dragons and unicorns, I guess... what a world those people live in!
- bluGill 2y agoThat is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article, government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets approved all the time because it looks good.