zlacker

People who don't come from a hardcore engineering background, often fail to understand what goes behind making good engineering deliverables.

This problem has complicated since MBA types people have taken over. Everything is a cost center, and goes into some model in a spreadsheet. The 'What If' feature gives you all kinds of fairly tale cost savings and optimisation options, as you turn the dials and knobs.

There is also a failure to understand that some amount of extra investments in people, quality and training is needed to keep the profits going. It might appear like they are not contributing to profits directly, but as it often happens eliminating them causes loss.

You are basically trying to modify a highly complicated and delicate process, optimised over years of lessons, changes and far sightedness. Trying to optimising entirely from a cost perspective leads to all kinds of counter intuitive results.