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Comment by ggg9990 | Hacker News Reader

I am not going to say that this is a bad thing. One thing about managing a widely distributed company, with workers of various skill levels, is creating crystal clear rules. The rule that “everything you fill in online MUST be an exact replica of a customer’s handwritten input, and anything else is a fireable offense” you avoid people trying to say “well she said she wanted the $500 paint upgrade even though she didn’t write it down.”

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pros:

- crystal clear rules

- the laughs

cons:

- people not thinking about what are they doing

- customers going like: do they even know what are they doing?

that first con outweights by a large, large margin any pros I could come up with

The point of the crystal clear rules is to reduce how much the human operator needs to think about what they're doing. Should you teach your workers every legal nuance they need to sell a car (and hope they follow them), or do you setup clearly defined rules that can be easily followed and repeated?

Part of effectively managing geographically-scaled companies is figuring out how to grant sufficient autonomy to local offices. There's a constant tug-of-war between, on the one hand, a desire to establish standards so as to protect the brand, and promote a consistent experience for customers across locations - and on the other hand, providing autonomy to local offices so that they can provide personalized service, i.e. the opposite of the "faceless corporate drone" archetype, because otherwise you're hurting the very brand you're trying to protect.

If your employees feel like they're slaves to meaningless head-office regulations, your policy is probably unbalanced.

I am not going to say that this is a bad thing.

It's a red flag, if they care so little about the documentation they put in front of you before the sale then what are they going to be like after.

I'd probably walk away.

There is huge gap between "mark you are not robot by pencil" and "well she said she wanted the $500 paint upgrade even though she didn’t write it down". I am pretty sure that more reasonable, but still crystal clear, line exists.

Especially in widely distributed company, with workers of various skill levels and cultures, someone is guaranteed to conclude that "rules in this company are dumb, so it only dumb people fully follow them " - e.g. less compliance anywhere where you can not immediately check the rules.

I've seen smart people making dumb mistakes on a bad day. You simply can't trust any random person's judgment and lose money along the way.

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