“Systems People” will systemize without considering the long term consequences of why they’re e

0:00I had an accounting team in one of our companies who said hey, can we have some software developers write some code to automate this task that we do. It takes us like four hours of manual input every week. And I was like, wow, that's tough. And so, I went to software developers and I said, hey, what would it take to do this? They're like, oh, we can do it in 14 days. It's 5,000 a day, FYI. And so, the accounting team was like, great, can you sign off on this? I was like, okay, hold up. 14 days times 5,000 is 70 grand. You work for four hours a week on this thing. [music] You make $70,000 a year. So, 10% of your paycheck gets allocated towards this task. So, $7,000.

0:30So, in order for me to get a return on this 14-day quick automation system, it would take me 10 years. [music] And that's a pretty shitty return. And that assumes that nothing changes over the next 10 years in our business that would cause us to have to update this thing, break fix because we switch systems. And I think you can get where I'm going with this. Of course, it made [music] no sense. But, quote, systems people will systematize without considering the long-term consequences of [music] why they're even doing it to begin with. They just get OCD about and they just want to system everything, but all they do is slow people down.