Austerity and the trouble of recovery costs
It just so happens that yesterday I was talking to someone about this and then today I found this article: How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks.
I will let you read the details, but the conclusion is what needs to remain: "Being a cheapskate can be expensive indeed."
The article is written from an economic point of view, so I will adopt the same tone from then on, but let's not forget the damage done to actual children and human beings, a damage which cannot be measured in money.
But, by all means, let's be as cynical as the people making these decisions and let's just talk in terms of how much money these decisions will cost them (because, yes, money makes the world go round and health is a minor issue).
We've just come out of a period of crisis. During this time lots of companies laid off a lot of people for reasons of cost-saving. I can totally understand the decision, hard as it may be for me as an employee, what I am arguing here is how they decided which people should be laid off. Because the big issue here is that in many cases they fired the people with the bigger salaries based on the logic that that meant saving more money.
But that is not the case, is it? Because unless out of wrong HR policy you are paying lots of money for a useless job, the guy with the biggest salary is the guy doing the toughest job or the guy who is the best on his job. Through his experience, he is doing things faster and better than anyone else. So that big salary you're paying him is actually saving you money, since you will spare money from data quality issues (and if those data quality issues are reaching your customers, they may end up costing you quite a lot), you are saving a lot of time in production and so on. I find that in many cases companies do not take these aspects into consideration. And the consequence for this is that they will hire an inexperienced guy instead of and experienced one and he will do his job worse and end up costing the company a lot more.
This is not the inexperienced guys' fault, of course. Assuming that you find an intelligent cheap young graduate to hire, he will learn to do things properly. But he will learn and make mistakes at your expense because the experienced guy who could have taught him to do things right from the start is not there and when he will reach a level where he will no longer make mistakes, he will expect to be paid accordingly. So where exactly are you saving money?
On the level of more personal decisions, I remember how my grandmother used to "save" money by not heating up her house. But yeah, you live in a cold house, you're going to get sick and when you get sick you get treatment and that costs money. And the trouble is that if you get sick a lot with time, what will happen is that your body will weaken, problems will add up and there will come a time when money will not fix the issue, just alleviate it. And the cost of alleviating a problem rather than fixing it is continuous. Not to mention the unpleasantness of being sick (but I established at the beginning that we're just talking money so, OK, let's skip this).
Slightly related is one of the first blog posts I wrote here: Quality vs Quantity. (short summary, why you should never use just the price to establish what you buy).
There's a saying in our country: "I'm too poor to buy a bad product". The bad product may be cheaper at the exact second of the transaction, but it always ends up costing you more in the long run. You don't save money by buying bad products, you save money by buying products that will no longer need investments to fix later on.
I will let you read the details, but the conclusion is what needs to remain: "Being a cheapskate can be expensive indeed."
The article is written from an economic point of view, so I will adopt the same tone from then on, but let's not forget the damage done to actual children and human beings, a damage which cannot be measured in money.
But, by all means, let's be as cynical as the people making these decisions and let's just talk in terms of how much money these decisions will cost them (because, yes, money makes the world go round and health is a minor issue).
We've just come out of a period of crisis. During this time lots of companies laid off a lot of people for reasons of cost-saving. I can totally understand the decision, hard as it may be for me as an employee, what I am arguing here is how they decided which people should be laid off. Because the big issue here is that in many cases they fired the people with the bigger salaries based on the logic that that meant saving more money.
But that is not the case, is it? Because unless out of wrong HR policy you are paying lots of money for a useless job, the guy with the biggest salary is the guy doing the toughest job or the guy who is the best on his job. Through his experience, he is doing things faster and better than anyone else. So that big salary you're paying him is actually saving you money, since you will spare money from data quality issues (and if those data quality issues are reaching your customers, they may end up costing you quite a lot), you are saving a lot of time in production and so on. I find that in many cases companies do not take these aspects into consideration. And the consequence for this is that they will hire an inexperienced guy instead of and experienced one and he will do his job worse and end up costing the company a lot more.
This is not the inexperienced guys' fault, of course. Assuming that you find an intelligent cheap young graduate to hire, he will learn to do things properly. But he will learn and make mistakes at your expense because the experienced guy who could have taught him to do things right from the start is not there and when he will reach a level where he will no longer make mistakes, he will expect to be paid accordingly. So where exactly are you saving money?
On the level of more personal decisions, I remember how my grandmother used to "save" money by not heating up her house. But yeah, you live in a cold house, you're going to get sick and when you get sick you get treatment and that costs money. And the trouble is that if you get sick a lot with time, what will happen is that your body will weaken, problems will add up and there will come a time when money will not fix the issue, just alleviate it. And the cost of alleviating a problem rather than fixing it is continuous. Not to mention the unpleasantness of being sick (but I established at the beginning that we're just talking money so, OK, let's skip this).
Slightly related is one of the first blog posts I wrote here: Quality vs Quantity. (short summary, why you should never use just the price to establish what you buy).
There's a saying in our country: "I'm too poor to buy a bad product". The bad product may be cheaper at the exact second of the transaction, but it always ends up costing you more in the long run. You don't save money by buying bad products, you save money by buying products that will no longer need investments to fix later on.
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