I came across the reverse of the CRT repairer.
I met a guy who was a salesman, a VERY good one. His basic pay was low but the company had one of those ever increasing bonus schemes after you met the required target, so that as he sold more and more stuff, his percentage bonus was for ever increasing through the year. He became too expensive to employ even though he brought in lots of business.
So they sacked him, hired two guys to replace him, and their 2x basic pay plus 2x small bonus was a lot less than his basic plus huge bonus. For roughly the same amount of sales.
We are talking 17 years ago. His basic was about £12k, his bonuses were typically £40k+ . His replacements were getting bonuses of only about £5k, with a lower basic as they were new staff.
We met on a computing course. I was being made redundant and given retraining. Why was I made redundant??
The bean counters at the college I lectured at had calculated that a course had to pay it's way by having a certain minimum number of students on it (seems sensible you'd say).
As it was a chemistry course I taught we had a fair number of specialist support technicians and equipment to fund. So our target course size was a little bit higher than others (again, seems sensible you'd say).
So I had just moved to this college and three weeks into my new job, busily preparing lectures, a memo came round saying that we had only 14 applicants for year one of our most prestigious course, two short of the target 16. So they were cancelling the course for that year, to save money, and there might be redundancies - last in first out being me!!! And I hadn't even seen a student yet! (Actual redundancy was announced seven years later.)
These accountants are SO clever aren't they, when it comes to saving money! Because all the staff were full timers, all got full pay as normal, had less teaching to do, with one course cancelled to save money and its income lost. Save money???
The inevitable happened of course - from then on, students were reluctant to commit to our college unless they knew that the courses were definitely running, numbers dropped yearly (the accountants eventually reduced our minimum number per course "too avoid redundancies" - actually because they finally worked out they had cost the college money by cancelling courses and paying us to do less).
Eventually the numbers were so low that courses genuinely had to be cancelled and we tried various tricks to re-organise things to keep costs down. We even had staff voluntarily take redundancy, then continuing teaching FOR FREE for one term, gambling that they could come back part time the following year to teach the rest of the course for three terms (but not actually teach for the third term, to make up for the free work they had done). We suspected that this was actually illegal, as we kept quiet about who was teaching for free to help the students, but no-one outside our group knew this and the students benefited. Okay, we KNEW it was illegal, as you can't be made redundant and immediately continue part-time in the same job, and they had a requirement to be re-employed that there was a four month gap between the redundancy and part-time work. Gap being greater than one term, to stop fake redundancies, which was probably sensible you'd say.
For the sake of letting one course run one year with two less students than the accountants wanted, an entire teaching department and all its support staff watched they jobs slowly disappear down the drain, and we saw it coming for several years before the accountants did. We went out in style however - 33% of the degree students got a first in the last year it ran (the students from the cancelled course came back and formed a fair part of that last group), and a few other courses managed 90%+ pass rates in their last year.
Accountants - don't you just love them.