This kind of sentiment always shows up after the fact but the hard part is actually knowing it ahead of time.
Emphasis on knowing. I’m sure some people thought it was a bad idea ahead of time. But there are always people who think any new idea or big change is a bad idea.
The reality is that anything significant has to be tried out, for real, to find out. That’s the premise behind proven useful decision frameworks like agile or MVP. And as the GP says: good management shows up when they read the attempt clearly and resist the sunk cost fallacy.
Bad management sounds like “let’s never change anything” or “we’ve already come this far, we need to finish it no matter what.”
And to a large enterprise, tens of millions of dollars is not an existential amount of money to lose on trying something significant. Big sports teams lose that much on bad player moves all the time. “We can’t ever waste money on trying new things” is a great way to sink deeper and deeper into whatever rut you happen to be in at the time.
Literally your primary job as an executive. Strategic knowledge and wisdom
If wasting tens of million on a bullshit initiative isn't an example of bad management then literally nothing is.
The only place these types of terrible managers can exist are too big to fail companies like LinkedIn and the Government where theres zero repercussions for poor management decisions because money keeps pouring it.
In smaller leaner companies where money is actually important executives actually have to be good at their jobs.
> "We can’t ever waste money on trying new things"
There's a difference between a good strategic decision and starting a "facebook for pets".
Some ideas are terrible at the outset.
And executives whole reason for existence is to make this determination.
Blueshift was an objectively terrible decision and whoever made that decision is objectively bad at their jobs.
It was MS buying LI and then wanting them on Azure. There's a huge Azure branding play here that - I'm guessing - drove this work. A distant second was some cost savings in the far future.
The hit to Azure's brand for this is probably significant. Who was looking at a migration to Azure before who's now discouraged?
We have that going on in Norway right now. Our state hospitals are switching several aging systems to some Epic-based monstrosity, and so far it's been a complete shit-show[1].
A major hospital has been running it for a year with lots of issues, some which has certainly affected patients gravely. It was rolled out despite heavy protests from doctors and nurses who had seen or experienced the new system at the smaller pilot hospitals.
Yet management is pushing on, and just decided the next big hospital should get the new system this spring, despite the many severe issues that are still unsolved.
Its like buying both Blockbuster and Radio Shack stock while their stock was in freefall then selling right before they declare bankruptcy and being proud at how good of an investor you are for not losing more money?
I feel like you’re reaching really hard to make this work.
Companies, teams and people do research and test projects all the time to determine direction. Making a decision like moving the entire LinkedIn data center is just a larger version of that.
That's actually not what I said at all. What I said was...
> Any amount of employee time spent exploring options that aren’t pursued could be framed that way.
Employee time costs money. If 20 people are in a meeting for 1 hour, that 1 hour meeting costs the equivalent of 1 hour of each of attendee's salary. 20 people attend a meeting making $100 / hour, you just spent $2,000 for that meeting.
All time spent planning, also costs money. Every Agile "spike" to do research for a story costs money. Every architecture document. Every time you have somebody do a couple of prototype projects to test your options before you make a decision. Sometimes you can't easily find out what's involved until you really dive into the work. It's the nature of the beast.
For LinkedIn, purchased by Microsoft who also owns Azure I'm quite certain that during the process they assumed consolidation within Azure would be on the table. If anything it was probably expected to be a huge marketing push for Azure to be able to say that LI ran on Azure so it's likely a management decision that involved a lot of pressure to make it happen.
Being willing to abandon that decision after exploring to see what was involved is a big deal. In many companies you'd have just heard platitudes like "well we have to do it, find a way" perpetually extending the project while taking away from more valuable initiatives.
I used to work for a business telco that was acquired by a residential telco. They were so convinced they could roll this newly acquired company into their existing systems that they ran off all of the staff who built the systems. 2 years later, they finally realized that business telco was a lot more involved but by then it was too late.
I understand the thinking that got them there, but despite a lot of people trying to stop them they proceeded forward until their hand was forced. This LinkedIn decision could have gone much, much worse.
> being willing to abandon that decision after exploring to see what was involved is a big deal
Yeah but spending several years and many millions of dollars isnt 'exploring'.
I'd say it's a solid fail for the management.
But we can agree to disagree on this. I see you strongly believe that losing tens of millions is good management.
For what it's worth there's many posts nowadays on blind about how the culture of LinkedIn has tanked and I'm assuming management probably believes they're doing a great job in that area too.
You're really big on putting words in my mouth on this.
> I see you strongly believe that losing tens of millions is good management.
Costs are relative to size. There are a lot of people involved, it's going to cost a lot of money. Microsoft's operating expenses are estimated to be just shy of $350 million per day. At that scale, 10s of millions is not as impactful.
Could it have been done better? Of course.
Could it have been much worse? Yep. Significantly.
Kind of confusing statement as they threw away tens of millions of dollars in a failed attempt to migrate.