In terms of bad side effects of dumb systems, maybe this is not the worst in the world.
20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up.
It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.
Actually this has made me wonder what other apparently pathological management tendencies (from the engineer’s point of view) are just inefficiencies introduced via unused “insurance policies”/capacity maintenance/margin for error.
Of course, thinking critically about the error margins is one of the things that engineers are explicitly trained in, so it is somewhat surprising that we get upset about this sort of thing.
This is a really great point! The big tech companies are partly banks of human capital that can be deployed when an investment opportunity arises. Unlike money, the human capital actually cares about whether it's sitting idle or is efficiently deployed.
20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up.
It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.