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threeseedHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I've worked for a few and there definitely wasn't 1000s of people in the Legal & Compliance …

… I've worked for a few and there definitely wasn't 1000s of people in the Legal & Compliance departments constantly getting sued and harassing managers and engineers about travel expenses or diversity training. Instead, it is the exact same problems you see at every large company i.e. excess of middle managers each trying to grow their own fiefdom and duplicating capabilities across the organisation. Or it's too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures.

Original discussionWhy big tech companies need so many people227 source comments · at import
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rippercushionsHN

This post seems kind of naive? A big part of why big tech companies need so many people is because any big company, especially one sitting on piles of money, becomes a target for all sorts of predators and has to defend itself. So it has to have armies of SOX compliance officers (because it's still cheaper than getting sued by the SEC), travel expense auditors (because it's still cheaper than shareholder suits after a VP whoops it up in Vegas and sends the bill to the company), mandatory diversity training educators (because it's still cheaper than getting sued by various minorities), patent litigation departments (because it's still cheaper than losing to patent trolls) etc etc, all of which feel like "bullshit jobs" to the average 3-man startup because the average 3-man startup doesn't face any of these problems.

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logifailHN

> excess of middle managers [and/or] too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures My OH works for a big multinational, has had a variety of roles, at a variety of locations, and despite the fact that she's not in tech you've still managed to summarise pretty much every single conversation I've had with her about her work over the last 20+ years.

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jameshartHN

The thing about being a large company in an innovative industry is that the optimal number of “poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures” you need to run is not zero . Certainly it’s possible to run too many of them, but if you are overindexing on perfect vetting and execution of every idea you might not be running enough .

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