Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by qnsi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

qnsi

Amazing. It kind of sound unbelievable, but I don’t have that much experience working with big corporations.

This should be read by everyone concerned about, how few people in a startup can beat big corporations

View on HN

Big corporations are batshit.

One division will be counting paperclips and another dropping $50k on a machine no one needs to do their job.

It entirely comes down to management in each place.

Be on a project where you billed over a 100 hours for some aspect of it that they decide to cancel. It is amazing how group decisions can blow so much.

Now, I do not mean experiments and throwing the artifacts of that experimenting. That makes perfect sense. Its when they have a need for something that is part of their current business and they just don't execute properly to the point of cancellation.

I work for a Fortune 100 company. I've seen $5+ million spent on some software that was abandoned a year later, and nobody loses their job! It happens frequently enough that everyone is basically blase about it.

Ive heard $300 million was spent on a system at a comoany I worked at which didnt work at all. They bought it because a competitor did. The lower-level managers had to tell the higher-level ones that it was OK "despite some problems." They kept tying more things into it and recommending it to others. Media reports same thing.

Funny that the supplier's entire business model seems to be to charge so much for a BS solution that each company is forced to recommend it to others to avoid reporting the loss.

I work at a decent sized Engineering Firm, I billed 4 Months of time to a project they then outsourced. Then again I'm salaried, but that's still 4 months of wasted effort.

This is true of every BigCorp I've been at. An IT department will be carefully evaluating some extremely expensive class of enterprise software. A business department will randomly purchase one of those options at random, without consulting IT, just because a software vendor mentioned it in a passing.

>Big corporations are batshit.

Why do you think this is limited to big corporations? Plenty of smaller shops are doing the exact same thing

During the early days of "intranets", I worked at a very large company akin to a government organization. I thought we could save paper by putting our reports on the intranet instead of printing it out. There was one particularly important report that had needed to be printed every week, and it seemed like a good candidate.

I called the person who needed the report, but they said they didn't need it, and passed me to the person who requested it from them. I called the next person, and they passed me onto another person. I followed this about 5 people deep until I found one person who told me that they didn't need that report at all.

I left that company within 2 months of joining.

I don't know how it is in big corporations in America. But working as a consultant in Western Europe, I have been more than once in a situation where I'm starting on a project and I have to wait more than 3-4 months for things like accounts, access/permissions, laptop. Its pretty pathetic at the dailies, to report every day that I'm still waiting for these things.

my friends in Poland (but working for international corps) have similar stories. Starting work and not doing anything for few months before they get everything they need

It sounds believable to me. I've had some interactions with big companies and you have to readjust what you think is a reasonable price for something.

I work with hardware and you'd be amazed how much people will spend without batting an eyelid (eg tens of thousands on a single instrument). In some cases they'll even remark at how inexpensive what you've offered is.

For example, the thermal cameras I work with are now consumer available for $5k. A decade ago you'd easily spend an order of magnitude more for the same sort of performance. And companies would happily fork out for it.

Bear in mind this company just lost a developer. The overheads for that member of staff alone, for two months, probably exceed $20k in the US.

$18000 is the kind of petty cash that a lot of departments have lying around in their budgets at the end of a quarter. Especially if the budgeting process is of the use-it-or-lose-it variety, there can be a push to buy things that are unnecessary at the end of quarters or fiscal years.

I've been involved in more than one project where a company bought a largish subscription license for a product, and never got anybody lined up to actually deploy it before the licensing ran out - I assume whoever was in charge of that initiative got laid off or took a new job and it fell through the cracks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com