There is a defensible reading of that story which goes "Our engineering and marketing teams stumbled into a ridiculously inefficient process to do something critical for the business. After a bit of reorganization, while the new process has some kinks in it, we're increasing sales faster than ever while simultaneously not wasting thousands of dollars using senior engineers as glorified typists."
n.b. I don't want to criticize engineering choices from afar, but if people can bork production with malformed XML, that suggests opportunity for further process improvement to either check XML or render it unnecessary. Visual Website Optimizer, for example, mostly abstracts that away.
P.P.S. Quantify the problem to management, fix it, get heavily rewarded. You could even use the proceeds to take a trip to Wall Street, if that floats your boat.
- I gave font size as very easy example, and there are dozens of products that make that very easy. But a lot of our testing ends up being very heavily backend-oriented (e.g. "let's try this new optimization engine combined with this optimization engine"). So any third party tools probably won't be plug and play unless we made some fundamental changes to our web applications.
- And I have quantified making those changes long before the layoffs (although I had another in-house solution in mind, not one that used third-party tools), because even if 1% of engineering time is spent executing scripts like robots, that's 1% that could be better deployed into a profit center for the company. The problem is, like I'm sure many engineers understand, is dealing with executives who don't quite grok the technical limitations of the current system, and who have a hard time prioritizing anything that doesn't directly lead to more money in the bank account.
- And this is my main point... so we had layoffs, and ended up coming to a defacto more efficient solution, which would be okay if me or anyone else involved in this solution was compensated accordingly. Instead it's executives that will get lauded for cutting costs, even though the current solution now introduced a high risk of impacting our ability to actually execute on the aforementioned initiatives that would lead to directly more revenue.
- So basically, what I'm most frustrated about, is this: I had a proposal that would have improved an inefficient process. That proposal got ignored, then we had layoffs, then we were forced to improve on that inefficiency in a way that wasn't that much more efficient. If we ultimately get this all to work, the executives get bonuses for increasing profit by lowering headcount. If it doesn't, they get cut loose with what I assume is some generous compensation package.
I'm not trying to just rattle some populist chains here or complain about "the 1%." My point is, it's not the actual elimination of jobs and creation of 'shadow work' that is a problem, but the context of which is eliminated. In most cases it sucks for the people whose jobs got eliminated, and it sucks for the people who now have do the shadow work because they're not seeing the rewards of the new efficiency (e.g. lower prices at the grocery store). Instead, some layer of people highly detached from the process typically gain the most benefits.
n.b. I don't want to criticize engineering choices from afar, but if people can bork production with malformed XML, that suggests opportunity for further process improvement to either check XML or render it unnecessary. Visual Website Optimizer, for example, mostly abstracts that away.
P.P.S. Quantify the problem to management, fix it, get heavily rewarded. You could even use the proceeds to take a trip to Wall Street, if that floats your boat.