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Comment by geoffwa | Hacker News Reader

I feel that as organization size increases, individual responsibility decreases.

At some point there’s a limit where individuals become responsible for nothing and everything is a policy or process. It would be interesting to try to study or quantify this with different orgs and roles.

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Funny enough i though so as well but discovered quite quickly that without this stuff, a lot of people are doing shit.

Do i think someone needs to tell me not to put every shitty tool on my work laptop which has a corp certificate? Access to vpn and corp network? With access to HyperScalers?

No.

What do my collegues? Everything. Oh there is a nice new shiny tool and it sends metrics to an external service, lets try this out...

I'm not in favour of the "BigCorp controls my entire machine" approach, but this is silly. It's not a lot of people doing shit, it's a problem of scale.

Have you verified that every single application installed on your machines sends no telemetry, no crash reporting, and has no random web servers running that run arbitrary code? It's likely that you've missed one application. Now multiply that by 10,000 employees - all it takes is one application per person, and you have a massive amount of data being leaked.

When you reach a certain scale, you will verify the tools which are running on the machines of your employees.

I'm not seeing a problem with it and my default stack is not that big: chrome, intellij, shell etc. it is reasonable and someone has to do it.

This is allegedly what happened to the entire German population during the holocaust. They even made up a word for it something like "office talk." People displaced their personal responsibility with lies like "I HAVE to, it's the company policy. I just do my job. I don't make the rules."

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