Been feeling this for a while now; honestly, my passion for technology in general and how I can use it to improve the lives of others is what keeps me in the IT sector, because it sure as heck ain't business cycles or Agile/Scrum Zealotry.

> And there is no such thing as long-term sustainable success without human ingenuity.

This is what I try to get at when I say I'm a long-termer. Companies need people who stick around for decade after decade, who retain that historical knowledge and pass it on to others. Frustratingly, companies have chosen to throw those workers out in favor of consultants, MSPs, contractors, outsourcing, offshoring, and whatever else reduces costs and bumps their bonuses for the current quarter. He gets to that in literally the next paragraph:

> How many times do we need to see margins and profits crater and management fire everyone before we realize that a flywheel spins for only so long before it needs to be refined or replaced?

> Who can do that? The problem-solvers, the fixers, the innovators, the outside-the-boxers—and we can’t measure their output with charts and graphs, let alone monitor progress with AI and cameras or keystroke-monitoring software.

Companies inevitably face a life-threatening event (LTE) at some point in their existence. In the tech world, it could be a cyberattack, or outdated and unsupported infrastructure, or a vendor acting in bad faith to acquire a competitive advantage or even acquire you rather than compete. However, companies can really only respond in one of two ways:

1) If they kept institutional knowledge on hand, treated their workers with respect, retained top talent and rejected the MBA Cost Cutting Playbook, then they'll likely weather it just fine with moderate consequences. There will be pain, but they will overcome it and be in a better competitive position as a result.

2) If they outsourced, offshored, and laid off their tenured staff, they run a much higher risk of failure. Fixing Problem A might cause cascading issues with Problems B and C, for instance, because nobody knew how those systems interacted. A vendor audit might blindside you because the person who knew why you had Product X installed was let go years back, and couldn't tell you to yank it when it wasn't needed anymore or the license changed. Companies that do survive often end up spending far more money hiring permanent local talent on short notice than they would have if they'd just kept a tenured employee happy in the first place.

And what's the end goal of all of these short-sighted decisions?

Not to improve the business, and not to improve the products. It's only to improve the bonus value to leadership, and reinforce this misguided (and disgusting) notion that humans are cogs to be micromanaged down to the second, machines meant for repeatable tasks, and thieves who are out to steal every penny you have given the opportunity, rather than the living, vibrant, unique creatures they are.

And besides, this is already coming back to bite them in the ass by virtue of Goodhart's Law:

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The second you place a KPI on an "organic" task (that is, a task that isn't constantly repetitive based on specific instructions, a la assembly line work), it becomes something to be gamed by those out for themselves, and loathed by those who were already doing good work in the first place. That is the literal second your company begins bleeding its best, its brightest, and its most loyal.