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Comment by speby | Hacker News Reader

> One would think a payroll middleman has the easiest job in the world next to printing money. Companies put money in the kitty, you disburse the monies to other parties and take a cut. HN crew could probably set up an event-sourced system with Lambda to automate it all. 8000 employees, that does not seem like a lot?

Oh falling into the "could built it in a weekend" trap? Go right ahead, start a payroll company from scratch that can correctly pay, with proper auditing, checks and balances, any employee in the US (nevermind international) as quickly as possible, deal with wage garnishments, special deductions (401Ks, IRAs, FSA, HSA, and so on, part-time hourly and full-time salaried, bonuses with net-to-gross and gross-to-net, commissions for sales people along with "draw").... annnnnnnnd go!

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Wage garnishments! Nobody mentioned anything about wage garnishments! :washes hands:

Heh, I beg your indulgence for my cheeky comment, I of course know nothing of this matter, it seems easy, as all those task you mentioned can be converted to single rules. Not a weekend worth of work, but perhaps 20 weeks worth of work for a prototype?

> it seems easy, as all those task you mentioned can be converted to single rules.

Single rules, yes. For each State in the US. And every other country in the world. And that can change at any time of the year. Oh, and nobody form those various state and federal government agencies are reaching out to tell you when and what is cahnging.

And GP just listed a few things off the top of his head - there are literally hundreds of complexities in doing this that he glossed over...

The hubris of this is wild - a payroll system that is compliant in every US state and accounts for the many, many nuances of the US financial system is no small project.

Have you ever seen how hourly employees get paid? Especially ones at union shops with crazy rules about overtime? And employees grandfathered in under older "legacy" rules" Or employees operating under one-off rules? And each employer you take on has their own set of crazy rules?

Dude. Stop while you are ahead. Payroll is edge case upon edge case upon edge case. And if you fuck up any of those edge cases, you are fucking up some poor soul's livelihood (or maybe making their day and the expense of their employer!).

C’mon, I think the right response here is for you to realize there are some serious unknown unknowns here and now out before you become the next “you can build a system yourself quite trivially...”

Sure, you can create a non-union, full-time, no overtime, citizen/permanent resident, no taxable benefits, CA resident and company location only payroll company “trivially,” but who the hell would use your software when there are ones that handle much more complex situations?

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