[bb88]

There's two issues right?

1. Inability to estimate effort. Admittedly an academic issue, and should be taught to all engineers in college.

2. Inability of management to deal with delays due to bad estimation. This might be caused by a "bozo explosion", say, (where inept managers hire more inept people underneath them.)

Edited to add:

3. Why do we keep making assumptions that management must be infallible? In any dysfunctional organization, it might just take one bad manager high up in the chain that causes pain for the entire organization beneath him.

[redhale]

I cannot believe how much I love the term "bozo explosion". I see this situation all the time as a consultant, and now I have a fantastic term for it. Thanks for sharing!

[bb88]

I'm a consultant as well. You go through enough companies and you can see how much of a problem this actually is.

As much as I did not particularly care for the management style of Steve Jobs, as far as I know, he was the one that first used the term.

https://guykawasaki.com/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs/

Edited to add:

This just happened recently. Maybe you'll appreciate it.

15 years ago or so (before the term "technical debt" got widespread usage) management kept asking why we working on so many bugs. The solution was to label them as "enhancements".

Just recently within the past year, I saw the exact same thing happen again.

[Aeolun]

> If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”

Amazon took that to heart. Seems to have worked out for them.

[krageon]

They did? In what way? When I look at the online ecosystem for buying things in the EU, Amazon is consistently the one that can't promise I will get what I order, can't promise when it will come and can't make it easy to give them money. The only thing they do right is that they're theoretically cheaper, but then because you might get a product that doesn't work (and it's very hard to solve that issue to a standard that you'd expect as someone in the EU) the cost saving benefit goes right out the window.

[gilbetron]

They were the first that made online retail work. Plus there's the whole AWS thing.