Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kiba 1880 days ago
It's a familiar story.

Companies think they can save money by outsourcing engineering expertise. They think they can save cost by outsourcing everything to suppliers. So their financials look great, but that's absolutely misleading.

Then you have companies like SpaceX eating everybody's lunches, and to my surprise, still eating everybody's lunches.

3 comments

That reminds me of this article about how companies/countries/continents lose their tech knowledge:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

That was very insightful. A bit of a rambling read but worth it.
Incredible read.
This is nothing new, it’s just the MBA syndrome. Go to any MBA school and they’ll tell you how sales is a clear “profit center”, while engineering is a “cost center”, and that companies are made more profitable by “internalizing profit centers” and “externalizing cost centers”.

The ridiculous part is that this has extended to the point that subcontractors have other subcontractors, that have yet another subcontractor...

Would you say SpaceX has been eating a free lunch, then? Sounds about right.