[MisterTea]

> When it was time to renew our support contract had tripled in price.

Currently in PE hell myself. Company I work for was bought out few years ago when the owner cashed out. Right out of the gate it was a numbers go up game. New sales person was hired and their first order of business was - drum roll please - triple prices! Customers balked. Some walked. In addition, some employee benefits evaporated, vacation time cut drastically, shitty health insurance switch, employee perks like the monthly pizza Fridays were canned as if ~$500/mo in pizza was going to bankrupt the company. Meanwhile, employee morale is at an all time low and quality has faded.

Perhaps there is good PE out there. Somewhere. All I see are vampires.

[Ntrails]

PE remains a source of complete fascination for me. The game is clearly rigged to produce bad outcomes at a societal level (eg no company loaded up with debt to finance buybacks/dividends and just eps ended up in a better long term financial position) - but we're completely incapable of doing anyhting about it.

[generic92034]

Yes, that is typical for a certain kind of management. Only costs that are visible and easily measurable are taken into account. Invisible costs or costs that are hard to measure are ignored, even though they may amount to a whole lot, up to the ruin of the company. Employee motivation is one example for the second type of costs, while the 500 bucks per month for pizza were easily seen and cut.

[sseagull]

The McNamara fallacy. One of my favorite fallacies vaguely related to Goodhart’s Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[greedo]

Barnes and Noble seems to be doing well with their PE ownership. Definitely better than the last few decades of Len Riggio's reign.

[dickersnoodle]

I'd have said ghouls. At least vampires are sexy...

[shawn_w]

These are Count Orlock style vampires, not Lestat and Louis.

[broknbottle]

It’s interesting how accurate this is to my experience back in like 2015/2016. Almost verbatim the same playbook. If they all utilize the same playbook, it seems like there’s an opportunity to use AI + skills playbook to trim the fat and streamline these PEs firms. I’m sure it could reduce headcount, lower PE management fees, etc

[HumanOstrich]

Replacing parts of PE firms with AI is so far from being a useful suggestion here.