[emeraldd]

> That sounds bad. But we have no idea what the company does, so we don't actually know if this is a problem or not.

That's true. The description of the company does lend itself to the belief that it was sufficiently large enough to make these things a problem. If you have people working in cubicles there is, more than likely, a need for them to have a computer, phone, etc. While it might be possible for them to not those tools, I would expect a different style of working environment if office work were not a significant component of their job.

> We have no idea how much the inefficiency costs or how much was saved by the cuts. So we have no idea if this was a bad OR good thing for the company.

From the sounds of things, they didn't have a problem with inefficiency prior to the cuts. It sounds very much like they had just the right number of just the right people on hand to keep things running smoothly. At that point, it's like you have an engine and decide, I really don't need all this oil, let's get rid of some of it. You might be spend less on the oil but then you have to deal with the increased wear on the rest of your engine or risk having it seize up completely.

Yeah, we don't know the real size of the company or what the company did but, the kinds of things he's describing will lead to a degradation of overall morale and you'll find that "broken window syndrome" starts taking over. You'll find that the IT people hate everyone and that everyone start's hating IT which makes the whole situation worse.

So the question is, do you save a little money now to find you have a massive expense in lingering in the future?

[zcvosdfdgj]

From the sounds of things, they didn't have a problem with inefficiency prior to the cuts.

He includes no details about the IT staffing levels in the company, what the budget was, the size of the company, what the company did, what the employees did, the reason for the cuts (other than speculation), or anything else.

For all we know, it was a company with 5 non-IT employees, and a staff of 50 IT people who flipped a coin once a day to decide which of 1 of them was going to work that day.

Prove me wrong. How many people were in the IT dept? What was their budget? What did the company do?

You have no idea.. because there are no details in the article. So you do not have enough information to say if there was an efficiency problem.

[fallenpegasus]

A company of about 400 total on-site staff, about 8ish internal IT staff before, and 3 internal IT staff after.

FOAD, Hope that Helps, Have a Nice Day.

[emeraldd]

8ish is significantly less than I was expecting. My hat's off to them for keeping things running so smoothly!

[keithpeter]

8 to 400 just keeping a system going (assumed MS from the vocabulary in the original article) sounds like a reasonable metric to me assuming no big business application development. 3 to 400 sounds very small, especially if there needs to be a Windows roll out (e.g. xp -> 7).

Disclaimer: I'm an observant end user who has worked in organisations ranging from 70 to 1200 staff total, and who has seen huge differences in basic it function. As others have pointed out, the cost of the less efficient IT support is 'hidden' in other budgets and in people 'just getting on with it'. I've seen newly appointed people share logins with established people just to be able to do anything which is an obvious security problem. My current employers have noticeably good IT support, but need to make savings, so I am worried.

[bdunbar]

Even if they'd kept 3 of the best and brightest they'd be hard pressed to keep up.

[zcvosdfdgj]

thank you.. that tells me far more about the situation

[emeraldd]

> For all we know, it was a company with 5 non-IT employees, and a staff of 50 IT people who flipped a coin once a day to decide which of 1 of them was going to work that day.

You're right on that, we don't have any idea about the total size of the department or the total size of the company as a whole. So, I'll grant you that there might have been some room for cuts in the department but, that really doesn't matter for his point.

What we see is that prior to the reorganization everything worked and that after the reorganization it didn't. This looks like someone pruned way too much out of an area that they didn't fully understand. The only thing we have to work from the assertion that:

"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."

I am making what I would consider educated guess on the scale of the organization and the impact of the changes. That impact would indicate that they now have insufficient staffing in IT and inefficiencies elsewhere as a result.

[zcvosdfdgj]

I am making what I would consider educated guess on the scale of the organization and the impact of the changes.

WHAT?! You're making a guess based on what? THERE WERE NO DETAILS. It's impossible for that to be an educated guess.

[Natsu]

> You're making a guess based on what?

I didn't write that, but it's clear to me that they're basing it on the results.

[zcvosdfdgj]

They got the "scale of the organization" from the results. No kidding.

[Natsu]

The OP posted and they appear to have been correct, while your "for all we know" turned out to be almost exactly backwards.

People match stories against their own experience. Any half-decent sysadmin probably has a story or two like this one. So yes, we do have something with which to assess the credibility of the story.

It would appear that you do not share that experience, though.