To say that some parts of the ABC run on the smell of an oily rag is a serious understatement.

Having come from The Age's old brutalist building to the ABC in 2009, I wasn't exactly accustomed to salubrious working surrounds. Yet starting work at the broadcaster's TV production offices in Elsternwick, to launch and run the new Arts portal, came as a bit of a shock. There was no room for another desk, so mine was squeezed into a tight corner beside the photocopier until more room could be found. The carpet hadn't changed since Countdown (now celebrating its 40^th anniversary) was in production, according to one old hand.

While management lauded the nimble, web-first production capabilities of its workforce, it was (and still is) a regular occurrence for staff (or even those on fixed-term contracts), to resort to buying or bringing in their own expensive broadcast-standard equipment to ensure the quality of their work. Often these were among the youngest workers on the least secure employment arrangements.

Employees who produced segments with a camera operator and sound recorder were suddenly, with minimal training (for some just a single day) and seriously outdated equipment, expected to shoot their own footage, record their own sound, then edit it all together.

Newer cameras were finally supplied to the unit, but were soon whisked up to Sydney to be used on Hungry Beast, an external production made by Andrew Denton's company.

Yes, there was waste, and profligacy, in some parts of the organisation. It came mainly from management, a combination of long-term legacy and short-term decision-making. (In recent weeks, as the cuts loomed, staff were briefed on plans for a new youth-oriented web channel. That now appears to now be on hold.) That was further exacerbated by the regular turnover of executives (so much so that one office was nicknamed the departure lounge).

In some parts of the organisation, there was a pool of staff on full pay who had nothing to do: they would sit at home waiting for a phone call to inform them when there was sufficient work to warrant them coming in. Efforts to second them to other resource-strapped departments were often frustrated. (This pool was significantly reduced in the last round of cuts in 2011.)

Around us, office interiors were endlessly and expensively reconfigured to accommodate new, often external, production teams, who would disappear months later once a program wrapped.

Executives were under pressure to deliver amid a sharp focus on ratings (I recall a particularly eye-opening conversation in a lift with Mark Scott in Canberra, as he peppered a TV executive with rapid-fire questions about viewing figures). One does wonder whether the government's latest cuts are a convenient smokescreen for management to make unpopular decisions to rid itself of programs it doesn't feel are pulling their weight.

That pressure filtered down to program makers, who felt keenly the need to boost ratings and web traffic to justify their jobs and secure those of their colleagues, but were frustrated at every turn with a lack of promotion and publicity for programs not deemed a network priority. Staff were recently told that some senior managers took that responsibility so seriously they had elected to take a pay cut to ensure there was sufficient money for programming.

Internally, workers were smashing down the silos that management had built up, sharing stories between programs and websites, and combining resources across divisions to make them. The goodwill and collegiality between departments, with News Online, News 24, Radio National, Classic FM, ABC Local Radio and the ABC Open initiative in the regions, as well as the now defunct Australia Network, was built up largely out of sheer necessity as part of an informal network.

That camaraderie seemed in some ways to embody the spirit of the ABC: let's hope this latest round of cuts doesn't break it.

Debbie Cuthbertson is The Age's Arts Editor. She edited the ABC's Arts portal from 2009-2011.