Been there. Seen it.

Well, not to *such* an extreme (after all, in Germany it's not *that* easy to
fire someone), but this type of "business" thinking has been around wherever I
worked since I got my first job, so I have come to consider it perfectly
normal.

Management people seem to excel these days at saving money on the wrong things.

I bet many of those famous "synergy effects" of company mergers are more than
offset by the loss of productivity during the transitioning period. Especially
when those transitioning periods become the standard, only occasionally
interrupted by unexpected times of stable working conditions, decision
hierarchies, IT infrastructures etc.

I guess many times companies "set people free", the gain (by not having to pay
so many people) is at least partially offset by the wrong people (from the
company's point of view) leaving.

Free coffee or other beverages at the company's expense are discontinued to cut
costs, forgetting that these small things make a difference as to whether
people like working for a company or don't, which in turn impacts productivity.

Important equipment for automated testing isn't acquired because it is "too
expensive", forgetting that this automated testing system may be able to
perform more tests more reliably over the weekend than a student may be able to
do in a whole month.

New people aren't hired because they'd be too expensive. Instead, whole projects
are put at high risk. The people working on those projects suffer constant
pressure as they're always behind schedule, people are on sick leave more
frequently and longer (for plain medical reasons - being stressed out simply
doesn't help you recover from or even fight a sickness), endangering the
project schedule even more.

Projects are outsorced to India, only to find that (a) what you pay for is what
you get, and (b) communication is an integral part of every software
development process, and isn't made easier by splitting up the work across
continents, language barriers and/or timezones.

I guess I could go on for days about such examples of management stupidity.

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