[decimalenough]

From my experience with using a $WITCH for a large support engagement, the A team woos you, the B team is what you get initially, and as soon as they think you've got your eye off the ball, they swap in the Z team.

This was for a contract where we made it very clear that quality/skill was paramount and we would happily pay above market rates forever if they could maintain it. Of course they got greedy and lost the deal entirely.

[pram]

No joke: I worked at an MSP and we onboarded a huge client, we were supposed to handle their network provisioning/problems through a dedicated service desk ticketing system.

After the B team set everything up, they didn't even get the Z team. A few months in, it turned out NO ONE was logging into their ticketing system at all, so there were hundreds of tickets their engineers had created with no acknowledgement. Just lol.

[latchkey]

Not a single engineer spoke up to say something?

[LudwigNagasena]

But why would you go a WITCH company if skill was paramount and you were ready to pay above market rate? You may come into a McDonalds and ask for the best coffee they have and be able to pay above market rate, but they wouldn't be able to help you even if they wanted because that's not their specialization.

[jeltz]

But what is their specialization? Because as far as I know they do a McDonald's quality job but charge wat more than a McDonald's rate.

The only use I have is so that cowardly executives can do what they already had planned to do but now can point to a bunch of paper that nobody will actually read in detail.

[arethuza]

Or A subcontracts to B who subcontracts with C and A tries to keep all of this secret until team C end up being involved in a war...

[dwattttt]

You have to keep a close leash on your contractors: https://www.loweringthebar.net/2019/10/fourth-level-subcontr...

EDIT: I am _very_ sad that link rendering truncated "murder plot" from that

[trollbridge]

Yep. War is one of those things where it doesn't matter how much subcontractor B is yelling at subcontractors C on the phone and telling them to lie about their names.

I used to tell the prime contractor to just be honest. They couldn't even do that. Most of my business now comes from clients of A who have been burned badly and now physically meet the person who will actually be doing the work.

[icedchai]

My friend is working with a $WITCH (from the customer side, not $WITCH side) and quality / skill is nowhere to be found.

[rhetocj23]

That’s exactly how it works.

[thelastgallon]

I've learnt this truth recently with most professions. Consultations with attorney based on rave reviews, after signing up, get assigned a random attorney from the firm. One attorney instantly sold my case to another attorney! Just started talking to chiropractor (i know! same as astrology), same trick!

I haven't seen this yet in doctors offices. I see a doctor at an office specialized in an area (say gastrointestinal), they wouldn't switch and need the consent of the doctor to switch to another doctor in the same practice.

[dmd]

Chiropractor is NOT the same as astrology. Astrology isn’t noted for causing permanent spinal cord damage and quadriplegia.

[tpoacher]

unless the stars lead you to a chiropractor

[dmd]

galaxy spine thinking

[trollbridge]

The quality of chiropractors varies so wildly that I would refuse to be treated by a new chiropractor that got bait-and-switched like that.

[LambdaComplex]

Chiropractic, as a field, was created by someone who was adamant that he got the idea from a ghost during a seance. He then claimed to cure someone's deafness via spinal manipulation.

Just go to a massage therapist or a physical therapist (depending on your actual needs).

[coldpie]

Skip all the fluff and try being treated by a doctor instead! That's what they're there for.

[jimnotgym]

In my experience, doctors will always treat a sore neck or back with pain killers or anti-inflammatories.

[lostlogin]

Did that work?

[BobaFloutist]

Perhaps a pt

[cjbgkagh]

While I’m not a big fan of chiropractors there it’s important context that few understand. In the US medical malpractice is deviation from the standard treatments, and the standard treatments are heavily influenced by insurance companies which creates a substantial misalignment of interests and often leads to very poor outcomes. Similar to how researchers should be paid to teach and not research because paying them to research pollutes the research with a misalignment of interests. With chiropractors their version of teaching is spinal readjustment, while they’re paid for doing that they can explore other things. Obviously not the best way to organize society but it’s an emergent behavior and a product of history. I did get my PRP treatment done by an enterprising chiropractor long before it became a standard of care, I had researched prolotherapy which was having great success in France for a long time but was unable to find a MD in the US that would do it for me. I had a serious injury that wouldn’t heal for 8 years, 3 months later it was gone.

Take for example in Germany a huge percentage of doctors are into homeopathy and other alternative treatments. I think this is a byproduct of the germ vs terrain school of thought and the revolution of microscopes, antibiotics, and the fact that the Allies won WW2 meant that germ theory won and terrain theory largely was brushed aside. Though not all German doctors are willing to give it up yet. Terrain theory is not always wrong, Japan figured out that lack of B1 was killing a large number of their sailors and fixed that with diet.

My focus is on genetics and dysautonomia, which if you do not have the statistical tools we have today will often look like subtle imbalances caused by environmental factors supporting the Terrain theory. A substantial percentage (~5%) of the population has some level of undiagnosed dysautonomia, probably due to an undiagnosed inherited genetic anxiety disorder. These are exasperated by environmental factors. There is an assumption that humans are generally healthy unless perturbed but for this subset of the population they really should be medicated and stay medicated. The problem is the lack of skill in systems engineering and statistics means doctors are usually unable to find the right medications (they tend to prefer stronger ligands and I think weaker ligands should be preferred) or the right dosing (I think patients should generally be in charge of their dosing and take medication based on how they feel once educated on how the feedback loops work).

The fact that some subsection of medical science can know the right answers but medical science as an institution does not, it has evolved in the past and it will continue to evolve, should indicate that what is currently believed is not based entirely in scientific discovery but massively influenced by schools of thoughts, artifacts of history, fashions, and luminaries. Much like humanities, individuals can inhibit exploration of alternative ideas and science can’t progress past them until they’re out of the way.

[ajfkeufh]

I see you contracted with tptacek's Latacora too.