Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's accounting bias/culture.

Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that increase revenue? If so, how much revenue? And when?



>Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

>According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Right, this is why developers should NOT get 2nd monitors.

Even better, the business can save another $30k by not getting the developers any monitors at all.


You joke, but my current job sent me a Dell laptop with a tiny screen and a fancy 4-video port USB-C dock. Seem I'm expected to have my own monitors.

(Turns out I do have my own monitors, but they are for my own laptop, and are HDMI and Thunderbolt which the dock isn't, except one HDMI.)


If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist, and when you start to quantify it, the numbers turn into targets that must continually improve.


Yep, and I think we can apply the accounting logic to the original article.

A team that regularly saves costs for other business units is a promise of cost savings. Dropping the entire time is an immediate and factual cost saving.

Short-sighted? Yes.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: