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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

> In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose their own video conference platform. It's picked for them.

Yes, for larger meetings that applies.

Realistically, people will ping each other and video call on slack/hangouts/whatever if they don't like company's choice.

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In my Big Company (400,000+ employees) it is not permitted to use other systems to host meeting without authorization. Using unapproved software is strictly not allowed. There can be plenty of reasons including business data security, legal data retention, international data privacy laws, licensing agreements, etc.

I remember when Skype was considered controversial because indication of working status and access to employees after business hours was potential a violation of workers rights and privacy laws.

400,000+? I don't mean to question this but that's a crazy high number assuming it's not Amazon or Walmart.

At a guess there's at least 20 companies with head counts that high, and most of them aren't tech and retail.

Much much more than that in case OP is not in the US.

Was that a guess? It was an impressive one. There seems to be 21 companies with 400k+ people.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o...

Huh, it was but I can't take credit for being clever about it, just simple order of magnitude estimation with a factor: e.g. I thought of a handful I was pretty sure were 500k+, rounded up to 10, then doubled as I know I don't know much about the space.

Globally there are many large companies of this size.

I’m trying to understand a world where employees at a large org will install a random comms client instead of just using what’s already installed. I worked at a place that used IBM sametime until they migrated off lotus notes. No one used anything else, because why? You’d need to convince every other person you wanted to talk to use it too, was much easier to just use the existing app.

Often these tools are adopted by smaller teams for their communication. So official company meetings would happen over teams, but bitching at Bob because he still hasn’t reviewed your PR would happen in Slack. It can make information management a nightmare, especially when users start sharing files with each other via Slack.

Most big co’s make it pretty clear to employees that it’s a pretty big no-no to discuss proprietary work through an unaudited 3rd party (especially a competitor).

Big Company can make it very difficult to use an alternative to the preferred tool. Blocking network traffic or restrictions on what binaries can be installed on corporate computers can be very effective at keeping the team using the same chat client.

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