[ahussain]

Engineers seem to think business people don’t know what they are doing, but if your post were true, then companies would add slack to outperform their competitors.

The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.

[ozim]

Adding slack works over years.

Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses.

When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one.

Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.

[array_key_first]

It's a measurement problem, which engineers also fall prey to, perhaps even more.

It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow.

But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time.

But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.

[idle_zealot]

> companies would add slack to outperform their competitors.

I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.

[wredcoll]

This would be true if everyone was optimizing for the same thing.

It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.