Misuse of higher order effects for personal gain by executives pushing changes

“If you can convince the higher ups that migrating tooling provides business value, you can do something that requires zero insight or creativity for a few months and at the end of it be promoted for organising a successful migration despite delivering zero measurable business value. The effects of the migration are gonna be second and higher order effects that are impossible to separate from the rest of the business so you can just claim the tooling was the leverage that let the people doing first order work succeed. Being a tool astronaut lets you claim a portion of everyone else in your orgs success without ever taking a professional risk, since your odds of being called out for an ineffectual change are near zero, since there’s no first order signals.

I’m not saying modern tooling is useless; I don’t use ed, cc, and make for my development. But there’s a huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to N+1 tooling effort. The first one requires figuring out all the implicit/implied/manual parts of the process. The second one is often just turning one set of configuration languages into another.”

Case in point; https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=26934620&goto=item%3Fid%3D26931359%2326934620

Formulated/organisational use of fallacy : Correlation / Causation