The corporate view on Shadowruns, Outsource labour and cut-throat management in the postmodern world Options

[EvilP]

I'd like to know what kind of decision making goes on before a corp decides to hire Shadowrunners rather than sending in their own teams.

I imagine that somewhere a manager runs some risk calculations. Turns out there may be a 70% chance of a strike team taking at least one casualty trying to do some industrial sabotage that might improve the quarterly profits. Risking a corp elite team easily worth over 150,000 per head in combined training, gear and medical enhancements might not be worth it when you can hire someone off the street with only slightly subpar skills and enhancements for only a fraction of that cost.

If the runners get wiped out to a man then that would have been included in the corp approved risk assessment and the corp won't even have to pay the runners. If the strike team somehow gets wiped out to a man then that's a loss of very valuable hard to replace company assets and possibly a very quick end to the careers of those involved.

In fact, why spend money paying your strike team's wages, purchasing their gear and offering them bonuses to get them to agree to radical performance enhancing surgery? You can ignore runners for as long as you want, pay them only when necessary and then watch them spend that very own pay improving their cyberware/gear/talismans!? Apart from the occasional disloyalty Shadowrunners are perfect employees.