[rosstafarian]

The exact quote is:

"Of course, it all went to shit. New employees would go a week before they had machines, phones, passwords, and ACLs. Printers ran out of paper, projectors ran out of lightbulbs, servers ran out of storage, networks got misconfigured, and so forth. The total time lost and wasted across the whole company was most certainly greater than the savings of laying off the expensive and skilled IT staff."

The guy might be a bit biased but it's completely clear from his article that even though he might not have exact numbers the company was much better off(not only in terms of total profit) with the old IT department.

Are you a manager?

[zcvosdfdgj]

No, it's clear from the article that he thought the company was worse off.. but really had no details to back it up.

All we know from the article is that IT was worse off. But we have no idea how the company as a whole is doing.

Maybe you aren't aware, but most companies consist of more than the IT dept.

[rosstafarian]

The OP does have details to back it up, just not hard numbers. He states how new employees had problems getting setup, old employees dealing with misc problems, things not running smoothly in general. Yes most companies consist of more than IT but these days the problem is many organizations seem to look at IT as an extra expense they can skimp on or even completely do without("The bosses son is really good with computer's he can fix any problems that arise!"). Theres two sides to every story and maybe this department was bloated and could've used some restructuring we don't know that part for sure but we do know that things went from everyone being able to work efficiently to all sorts of random issues, suffered by general employees not IT that should've been avoided.

You're taking this awfully personally, I'll ask again do you do in some sort of managerial position? Do you have some personal experience with this sort of thing?

[zcvosdfdgj]

The OP does have details to back it up ... employees had problems getting setup

Ok.. tell me about those employees. How much do they get paid? Minimum wage? What do they do? Do they even require a desk?

A week to setup a desk that the employee doesn't even need because they are required to travel constantly is not a problem.

You're taking this awfully personally

I'm not taking any of this personally. You're just sensitive because someone is suggesting that an IT dept might have required cuts.

Geez.. for people who are so scientifically-minded, you sure do seem eager to take everything in the article on faith.

[fallenpegasus]

I'm the OP.

The employees were expensive software developers, electrical engineers, RF signal electrical engineers, and microelectronics design engineers. There probably was one person making minwage. She was a very sweet developmentally disabled girl who delivered the mail to our desks.

[jaylevitt]

Similarly, we don't know the names of any of those executives. That means we don't know if we currently work for them. If we work for other executives, we shouldn't assume that we can generalize this story to our experience!

In fact, since the odds of this exact management team starting a new company in exactly the same industry with exactly the same business model are close to zero, I think we can agree that it would be impossible to learn anything from this story even if we DID know all the details.

[fallenpegasus]

A few years later, the company itself was effectively dead.

[mark-r]

Which leaves the question, was the cut in IT a cause or a symptom? It could have been the last in a long line of bad decisions; I can't see this bringing down a company all by itself.