Alternate title: $50,000+ literally being wasted but “I can't” pay my new guy a living wage
Settle in, this is long.
I work for a thriving services company in North America. We'll just call it Brand. Brand has a mobile workforce that goes out onsite to help our customers and does not come into the office much. It makes sense that everything we do should ultimately meet that end – providing positive outcomes while servicing our customers.
Brand has a person leading IT that does not do IT. This person is very smart and generally I like them a lot. They did a wonderful job hiring the people to do IT. Unfortunately, the top brass still sees this individual as our definitive IT expert (they are not), and worse, the person has been in leadership for so long that they're drowning in de-contextualized data and losing grip on the genuine reality of the company.
Years ago, we had needs for a very nice, very large space that could be used for the most important big meetings and get togethers. This same IT lead got starry-eyed while looking at a fancy setup somewhere, and because they wanted it, we end up getting a MASSIVE tv setup literally built into the walls of the room – total cost? $55,000. This was, absurd and silly, but as a one-off cost it was at least ignorable. A splurge expense. Fine.
Well, it turns out another smaller branch also soon wants a meeting room, and so does another one. For them the cost does not even remotely make sense, and really can't be justified at all. These same places have been functioning fine with $2500 setups for years, and I want to emphasize that this is just for routine meetings with our professionals that go service clients – we're talking powerpoints and narration a few hours per month. That's what this is used for.
Oh well, at this point, the IT lead has lost their mind, and before too long, we now have three of these setups. Total cost? $165,000. Before tax. The last $110,000 of this is in every way literally just completely wasted money.
Fast forward to last month, we have another office that literally meets in a garage one morning per week for a catch up meeting. They talk about goals and look at spreadsheets and stuff. Same as those other offices. They seat about 100 people (this is not as much as it sounds, think like 10 x 10 chairs).
They approach me asking for a solution because their TV screens are not visible to the people in the back. I'm pretty good at my job so I come up with a nice solution that makes them happy and will solve the problem for a few thousand dollars. It's cool, fits the garage environment, and the people who asked me for it are happy with it as a solution. I want to emphasize that. The people that asked for it were very happy with my inexpensive solution.
While this is going on, we needed summer help because we're understaffed. My team believes in “paying it forward”, so we get a completely fresh faced new college kid with no experience, so he can get some experience. We'll train him, help him, whatever – if you're smart and you'll work hard when it's called for, that's all we need.
They decide our budget for him $12/hr. This is less than the chik-fil-a down the street pays. We fight with leadership to pay more, but the answer comes back “Why would we pay more if we don't have to? He needs experience on his resume that's part of his compensation.” This is a tech job. Our qualifications are at least 2 years in college working towards a tech degree. We fight and fight but they won't listen, and our summer help, doing difficult IT work that requires a huge degree of trust and care, is now making a below fast food wage.
Fast forward a few weeks, and my meeting room solution for the garage makes it to the IT Lead for approval. They promptly dump on it for the reason that “no, we need the same meeting equipment everywhere” and they proceed to force our team to contract out another $55,000 media installation. In a literal garage. Mind you – the only reason this setup exists in more than one place is because they wasted $110,000 to put it in two unnecessary places already.
TLDR; I now have to get a quote and installation date to literally waste almost $60,000, for massively overkill meeting equipment that people didn't even ask for, but I'm not allowed to pay my summer hire a living wage. He will help handle this install. He's going to have to help build $60,000 of utter waste, while the company looks him dead in the eye and says they can't pay him a living wage.
I'm going to throw up.