It’s at best a passive aggressive solution to the problem. The assertive solution is to tell the manager of the group that if they don’t find some humility quick then they’ll be finding a new job.

It seems like this problem happens in organizations that equate headcount with power. Which I guess makes some sort of sense but doesn’t feel right. Plenty of companies do not have the majority of their employees working on producing the goods they sell. Especially if they’ve started automating.

But as I said above, this is an ‘asleep at the wheel’ situation. It seems like it’s often not the biggest problem these companies have with their vision.

And, it sometimes happens that actual tech companies start outsourcing their tech, which is a whole other troubling pattern.