[bobbytherobot]

I learned a lesson about opportunity costs while worked at an IT company. When I started, the company managed the IT for small companies, most being three to five people companies. We had full control of decisions so we kept them up-to-date with the latest best practices. I'm sure there was a bias of the types of companies who went with us as we charged more than competitors.

We started to gain larger clients. We thought that a 5,000 person company would be ahead of the 5 person company when it came to technology. Not so. Here is what we learned: there are political risks for changing technology. A CTO (these are not tech companies) would wait until people were complaining so extremely that people would have to feel that changes were good. It all arose from that bias most people have about change being bad unless it is ten times better.

[pnutjam]

This is so true. I've been in plenty of small business that are trying to do the best and their constraints are usually based on the ability of early hires.

Big companies have inertia to deal with for every change and once you get burned by something trivial that gets blamed for problems, you get very shy about improvements.

I'm in the process of building a system that had to make alot of compromises based on existing expectations. It's probably a year away from being where I want it to be because every change is so slow...

It's frustrating to defend these decisions every time someone comes along and notices how hard it is to use the system. I have to explain that every part of the system is broken out currently to find issues and fix them, the end goal is to stack everything together, but right now all the sausage making is on display and frankly it's appalling...

(edited for readability) end goal is turning a push button system that had to be carefully monitored for breakage (while it was running after hours) into a staged system that gets checked and verified during business hours, but still fires off after hours.