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Comment by avip | Hacker News Reader

I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward:

  1. Wu appears in work with a chair
  2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X
  3. X asks Wu to remove the chair 
  4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code
  5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it

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If you are in a large company then it will accrete these rules until it is almost impossible to get anything done.

It might be an interesting experiment to automatically attach an expiry date to new rules, and if nobody (or too few) stakeholders vote for keeping them, they automatically go out of scope.

This sort of happens by default in private industry, in that companies usually only exist for 50 years or so and are continuously being replaced with other organizations that haven't yet become sclerotic. This process is probably less efficient than just having rules expire would be.

Legal and tax systems could do with this, force politicians to decide what is really important.

To get anything done large companies hire contractors.

They also hire contractors for external validation. Their internal team knows they should do X, but they won't get buy-in from management until an external contractor comes in and tells the company needs to do X.

In big companies it's often easier to get decision to pay six-figure to external consultants than to not even pay four-figure to employees for the same job but sometimes to even accept the job which is already done by employees just for salary.

Or buy startups.

That was mostly true until startups started to hire contractors too, to get anything done.

Do you work at my workplace?

Honestly in some regards step 5 might be much more successful than what most people do. Most people go to their manager and complain about Wu. Then the manager does nothing. Then they complain at the bar to their friends how their manager AND Wu suck.

(Wouldn't exclude myself from that loser group, although I don't like to go to bars.)

People who are successful in step 5 like activity, most often became managers really quick.

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