[beat]

You're assuming that the cost of human capital actually matters in big corporations. As someone who has worked for several Fortune 100s and a couple of government agencies, I assure you, that is not the case. Employee time is treated as having no value, and things that damage the efficiency of employees are not relevant.

I once saw a "cost saving" round prohibit our team's QA engineer from getting a new SoapUI license (we were supporting an API!). It took three five-person meetings to get official approval to buy a $100 license - at a human capital cost of thousands of dollars. Not an eye was blinked at this absurdity.

Along the same lines, I once saw a lead architect go through the same nonsense to get a $100 Adobe Acrobat license (at a government agency). He said to me "It's easier for me to spend $100,000 dollars than to spend $100". He could have asked for a couple of new heavy-duty Unix servers with Oracle, and gotten it approved easily. But Adobe Acrobat? No, that's waste!

See also "bikeshedding".

[mumblemumble]

It works in the other direction, too. I've seen (and been in charge of) a depressing number of projects that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of people's time on writing an in-house replacement for a piece of software that cost, at most, tens of thousands of dollars.

My working hypothesis is that management types don't really think the costs are comparable, because licensing fees are an operating expense while in-house development costs are a capital expense. Which is true, but I imagine in-house development is a tricky thing compared to other capital expenses, since the final product generally has zero market value.

[Consultant32452]

Cutting costs gets you a raise. Delivering a big project is a path to promotion.

[gherkinnn]

It is absurdly easy to burn through thousands of dollars worth of employee time. Call something “review”, “emergency”, or simply discuss the colour of the bike shed. Everyone has an opinion on that.

Now invite all sorts of heads, leads, and other important people. Done.

I did consider setting up a mock meeting just to make that point. Let’s see.

[noobermin]

Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it has to be that way.

[hermanradtke]

Labor costs are usually the biggest expense at most companies. Management cares a lot about human capital, they are just bad at managing it.