Readit NewsMany of us understand the other causation arrow (corporate unsuccess leads to unhappiness!)
For example, it could just as easily be the case that adjustments to dysfunctional aspects of the company's internal politics improve both morale and productivity, but the morale change becomes apparent more quickly.
Same with any other part of the US government. It doesn't pay people what they're worth, so they can't attract enough good talent.
In my neck of the woods, there are departments that have to make do with whole teams of low-skill employees because, while a more skilled person could do the work of at least four lower-skill workers, they would also require two lower-skill workers' worth of salary, and you just can't be paying any one person that much money because that would be Government Waste.
So many people's first instinct to respond by buying more shares of that company, thereby driving its price and market cap higher. That's a reaction that implies that we think that the general trend is toward Buy-n-Large. If we expected regression to the mean to be the driving phenomenon, then we'd be more likely to respond by selling.
(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting that's actually how things work, just that a lot of us behave as if we think that's how it works, or should work.)
The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event.
The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.
There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
To take the example of support, pre-acquisition, the support team had a reputation for being one of the best and most knowledgeable in the industry. That reputation went up in smoke rather quickly when the acquiring company decided to merge support into their existing support vertical and adopt its existing policies, including things like requiring the support and the product development teams to communicate through JIRA instead of using informal channels like instant messages or (in exceptional cases) pulling a developer into the call.
The end result was that the mean time to find a resolution for the non-routine issues went from hours to days. Ironically, while management claimed this would reduce disruption for the development team, it actually increased the time that developers had to spend on supporting the support team, since it made communication so much more difficult. Which, in turn, means that it slowed down both customer support and product development by bogging them both down with paperwork.
https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do?"
Granted he's mostly talking about engineers, but I'm sure someone more knowledgable about marketing could write an almost identical essay.
I also can't think of a single large software company that doesn't, in the long run, survive by either endlessly buying and extracting all the value out of smaller software companies, or creating a moat that makes it almost impossible for new competitors to emerge.
Having worked for a small software company that got acquired by a large one that used the former survival strategy, and therefore witnessed firsthand the subsequent doubling of headcount and simultaneous halving of overall productivity, I can offer one of what I assume are several possible answers: Paperwork. And lots of it.
We know that Unions don't oppose salary caps, but they oppose differentials in compensation based on job performance. Seems like that amounts to the same thing? Unless you're suggesting we just pay government workers more and see if we get any marginal productivity out of them.