The GitHub website is slow on Safari

The client costs money too, opportunity cost.

Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured :( so no KPIs. Darn!

Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave. Ask Chrysler or GE. I mean they must have saved, what, billions across decades? And for free!

Well... um... not free actually, because those companies have been run into the ground, dragged through hell, revived, and then damned again.

MBA's ruin everything

Opportunity costs is something they are taught about in school but somehow seem to always forget about. I think it is more a question about incentives for the roles MBAs are usually hired into. Either that or the lack of knowledge of the actual product makes them too detached.

Who would even hire an MBA to improve such difficult to measurre things?

Maybe it will make a significant enough cumulative impact 5 years later that it can actuallly be noticed and defended in a meeting against other priorities.

But I’ve never heard of anyone hiring someone on minimum wage and deferring a huge bonus to 5 years later.

Even if it does makes a big impact, would anyone even take a such a job?

But taxpayers keep bailing them out... so how did they lose?

  > Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured 

This is such a subtle but important thing that so many people do not understand about data analysis. It's even at the heart of things like survivor bias[0]. Your measure is always a proxy and this proxy has varying degrees of alignment with what you want to measure.

I know everyone knows the cliche "The devil is in the details" but everyone seems to continually make these mistakes because nuance is hard. But then again what is a cliche if not words of wisdom that everyone can recite but fail to follow?

  > Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave.

The alternative is you develop a Lemon Market. Which is a terrible situation for all parties involved. Short term profits might be up but these are at the loss of much higher long term rewards.

[0] You infer where the downed planes were shot through the measures you can make on recovered planes. But that is very different than measuring where downed planes were shot. You can't just take the inverse of the returned planes and know where to add plating from there.

To be fair, many programmers are part of the problem too. But then again, it is getting harder to differentiate some programmers from MBAs...