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Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

OP does not understand risk management or product delivery and is therefore labelling it as "bullshit".

And yet, OP should feel blessed. Not because of the bullshit work, but because they are one of a lucky few who have managed to land a career doing what they love. Speak to any other person that managed to do that, and they all know what OP is describing.

My only advice for OP is - work on understanding the purpose, history and alternatives of the "bullshit", then move on to work at small (5-7) independent teams where you can control the "bullshit". If you do it well, you will find your gang and it will be liberating. Read about Kelly Johnson and his teams work on the U-2 and SR71, you will love it.

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Sorry but no. What you see in corporate environments has nothing to do with risk management or product delivery, it’s often just pure ineptitude and useless people artificially trying to justify their existence.

There definitely is waste in big corporations, but not everything you don’t understand is waste.

Many times in my life someone tried to tell me something that I disregarded as wrong or misguided, only to (years! decades!) later realize the that they were right in ways I just couldn't understand yet.

I suspect (and hope) this will continue for as long as I remain introspective and willing to learn and grow.

I feel like this is one of those things that only time and the perspective it adds can teach you.

I agree whole-heartedly. I’ve wasted many hours in security committee meetings. But then a CVE was discovered and we were able to respond in minutes. Earned our compensation 10x over with that preparedness, even if a lot of being prepared looked like downtime.

I‘m not sure if that’s the scenario OP describing.

In my experience, that would be a company that spends hours in security committee meetings and then fails to react appropriately in an actual emergency.

Sure. But in the things I do understand, I know waste when I see it (and I see a lot of it).

I actually couldn’t see it as well when I was younger and understood less.

You are attributing something to malice that can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Few people are out there actively misleading stakeholders about why they're important. If that was the case, businesses would be rushing to fix that problem. What you're seeing is simply overly complex, highly inefficient product delivery pipelines, which have been grandfathered in, and would be too expensive and too risky to fix. So companies continue chugging along as long as the line goes up.

> You are attributing something to malice that can be adequately explained by stupidity

Oh I didn’t intend to do so, that’s what I meant with ineptitude.

My bad, I misread your comment

People absolutely do because that is how you get promoted when you don't know what you are doing.

The fact is, most of the people on the corporate world just don't need to be there. They add nothing and slow things down.

The corporate world is so inefficient that most of the job is bullshit. I routinely came up with solutions which worked better in a tenth of the times and a tenth of the resources and made product about them after the contract.

Working in a startup is an improvement - and you have to be way more flexible on wearing different hats (some of which may feel like bullshit but are actually important).

Working on your own with trusted parties is nirvana.

The bigger the organisation, the greater the inefficiency. The worst are government or contractors working with the public.

I stopped working with people who ever worked with the government an I have to de-bullshit engineers who spent too much time at FANGs and picked up a bunch of bad habits. Ex startuppers make the best employees, super product and user focused while shipping consistently.

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