[joedissmeyer]

It seems to me that almost all upper management, and even many working as a manager inside the technology or I.T. departments, simply treat their tech workers and departments as arms of the finance department proper. Over time, every management decision is eventually made to only support the prime finance goals which is HIGHLY RISK AVERSE so decisions are made to avoid all risk at all costs -- at the expense of more "human-based" decisions like employee satisfaction, process improvements, experimentation or innovation. When this happens to highly-technical people like doctors or engineers, it tends to impact overall job satisfaction because training, experimentation, and innovation goes away usually because management starts saying "No" way too much.

"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy." "No that costs too much."

"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do." "Nope, there is no budget."

The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss. So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.

I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.

[mmcconnell1618]

This is a direct outgrowth of the Shareholder Primacy theory which is what many MBA students are taught. A business has many stakeholders and obligations and at some points in the past, employees and community were valued in balance with shareholders. Corporations provided pensions and acted for the good of the community in addition to making a profit for shareholders.

Once you embrace that your primary reason to exist is to enrich shareholders, everything lines up under the CFO. CEO pay packages are now typically weighted to incentivize the CEO to maximize shareholder value too because so much of their compensation is in stock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy#:~:text=Sh....