Technology

They don't care if it's worth it.

Corporatism makes every layer incredibly detached from each other, with everyone seeking their own glory, fuck the rest.

I can guarantee you that they hired some middle manager - not yet C-suite, but also not direct worker manager (say, an engineering or product manager) - like a VP, or Assistant VP (assveep), who recently joined the company, and has some very... Specific target KPIs to reach to get their bonus.

Basically, all the corpo layers are KPI driven, and you in your secluded job, will only focus on a single, specific aspect, instead of a holistic image.

What Maccas sees here is a manager who delivered what they were tasked with: AI driven pricing. Their goal was to have a system that adjust pricing for each person, outcomes be damned. The manager doesn't care, their job isn't to take care of the entire company, but to deliver that one tunnel-vision task.

This is actually why a lot of companies fail nowadays. I used to work for WBD, pre-merger on the D side, and this shift was incredibly obvious once management was pushed from the UK to the US (okay, pushed isn't the right word, they fired all UK managers and put all UK engineers under US managers). With local managers we had sensible deliverables, actual scopes and effects analysis, and they pushed back on idiotic requests. To give an example, I was working on the video playback component of the Discovery+ apps (in the US we had separate build flavours for all the channels, the rest of the world got the unified D+ with all the channels). Two channel heads approached us and wanted extensive feature implementations for a handful of niche programmes. My manager pushed back because those features would've used up 70% of our team's capacity and they didn't even have a cost analysis let alone any arguments for product value increases! But because those two channel directors were buddy-buddies with leadership, and (presumably) they were banging the two product managers who came up with these genius ideas, there was tons of corporate back and forth to get it done.

On the other hand, once we moved over to a US based manager; everything shifted. Our autonomy was reduced, and we had some product and head-of people pointed out as "never refuse anything they ask for", because those people's requests directly boosted the KPI of this manager, and the manager cared about nothing (not even doing his job, all EM tasks were offloaded to team lead engineers...) but his bonus - and as predicted, two years and two bonuses later, he "sadly" left the company with a hefty package (his termination pay alone was 6x my annual salary...). Meanwhile we had to deal with insane demands, no-pushback policies, and PMs that had to be pleased no matter what. Oh and on top of that, an enforced, illegal overtime scheme for on-call duties (this ended up buying them in the ass and as it came out during my redundancy consultation, I ended up getting a hefty 6-digit payout just so I don't report them to like three different British government agencies).