RE: RoboHelp Baby

["Nuckols, Kenneth M" <Kenneth -dot- Nuckols -at- mybrighthouse -dot- com>]

David Loveless said...
> 
> How interesting. I seem to have the opposite problem. Since it is the
> end of the year, our purchaser is being rather loose with his purse
> strings. I have a coworker who scored big time. He decided that he
> wanted to learn Flash and convinced the purchaser to not only fund a
> six-week training course but also to buy the complete Adobe CS2 suite;
> fund a course in InDesign, Photoshop, and HTML; and upgrade his
> computer screen from 17 inches to panaromic 24 inches. Is any of these
> needed? Well, no. He'll never use these skills in his job, but "I have
> to spend the budget or we lose it for next year!"
> 
> Does that seem just as incorrect to anyone else? It seems to me that
> the purchaser should provide necessary equipment quickly, but not blow
> the wad at the end of the year because they'll lose budget. Oh well.
> What do I know? I'm only a tech writer.
> 

I've actually heard of this practice and seen this happen in several
companies I've worked for over the years, and strategic-thinking (or
sometimes unscrupulous) department managers use that knowledge to their
advantage to gain new equipment (sometimes necessary, sometimes
frivolous) for their team. I've seen it most in public companies where
some nebulous oversight board or committee seems to take the attitude,
"If you didn't need all your budget last year, you can do with less this
year." Funny, you'd think that boards would seem to want to reward
people who can get by on less, but I guess that's just not the way they
work.

I suppose some companies might also want to artificially decrease
operating profits for tax purposes by blowing huge sums on supplies,
even if they are of dubious necessity.

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