A while back, someone told me that the purpose of a business is to make a ton of money, not quite those words, but that was the meaning. This struck me as wrong, but I did not have the words to refute it at the time. "The Polish pope's role in the fall of communism" provides some of that grounding. Specifically:
Historically, the Christian church had been skeptical of capitalism, not because of what the pursuit of profit did to exploit other people but rather because of how the pursuit of profit frequently corrupted individuals, making them avaricious, envious and materialistic. The pope's encyclical exploded both misconceptions: "The church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productivity factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied. But profitability is not the only indicator of a firm's condition. It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order and yet for the people, who make up the firm's most valuable asset, to be humiliated and their dignity offended. Besides being morally inadmissible, this will eventually have negative repercussions on the firm's economic efficiency. In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavoring to satisfy their basic needs and who form a particular group at the service of the whole society."
This paragraph necessitates that I read "Centesimus Annus" by Pope John Paul II, on which the proceeding quotation appears to be based. If the paraphrase and re-think is that good, I can only imagine what the original is like; having read a little of Pope John Paul II's writing, I feel sure that it will not disappoint, it will blow me away. The quote above goes a long way to putting business in its proper place; it pinpoints some of what I disliked about Rackspace as well. Rackspace was making any number of decisions less based on what was good for the customer, as what was sufficiently good for the customer as to make them happy while maximizing profit. Often this was done more or less explicitly at the expense of the employees. Support felt overworked (I cannot speak to their actual state, I heard conflicting reports from people in different parts of the company), DCOPS certainly was mistreated. Shift work is horrid, that is a given. But there is no question that DCOPS was a poor environment beyond that. It is responsible to sales, support, and engineering. It gets blamed for things it does wrong, but credit for keeping customers, making, or saving money always goes to one of the departments it is responsible to. So it gets treated like "overhead" while without it the company could not run. Support can do many things, but debug hardware problems in a box in a different building several states away is not one of them. With 4 guys per shift, 5 if you count the inventory guy, DCOPS also really cannot afford to do as much as either support or sales would like, the ratio of techs to servers is far too low. Additionally, the low numbers, kept low solely to reduce the "overhead" that DCOPs is seen as, mean that taking vacations is hard on everyone else in your data center, there are just enough guys to go around, so someone gets to pull double shifts, or some shift gets to go short a guy. Contrast this to the description of business above. Obviously Rackspace is failing to function well as a community, the departments end up in conflict, sales against DCOPs against support. The company has its priorities in the wrong place, making product an end instead of a result. Our faith teaches us that if we end at the good of the employee and customer, that while any job has limitations that must be considered, you can create a profitable company without causing the unhappy conditions that yield the high turn over in DCOPs, turn over I was hearing about for a while even after I left, 6 out of the 15 leaving or fired right within a month of my leaving. This rant is rather chaotic, and I am not feeling any flow towards a clean ending, so I am just going to stop here for now. I will most likely pick this theme up again at some point.