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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

I am actually seriously interested in what people there do day to day. I’m wondering this about a lot of very large companies, I would definitely watch a documentary about that.

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Hour-long meetings about whether the copy should read "data center," "datacenter," "data-center," or whether it is really even correct to say any of these at all. And then negotiating with the design folks to fit in the extra character. Only to throw it all away because nobody thought about the fact that it has to support 5 different languages.

I wish I was kidding. Used to work at a place that did crap like that, pulling in developers for these time sucks because "only they really know the correct technical usage for our industry."

I had a similar meeting with documentation folks about "dataset" vs. "data set". With Google trend charts and all... I also wish I was kidding.

It's not weird to pick one and keep a consistent style, for example by looking at Google or at Wikipedia or some other source if the dictionary lists both or neither, but to have meetings about it?!

Feels like something the technical writers and copy writers should decide around the watercooler if anything.

Smells like being afraid to make a choice, even a tiny one.

I work at similar size company. Basically they are like most companies building out the next 5 years while also keeping the lights on at four nines. There can be a lot of depth to product that you dont see. Anyone who says "why you need X people" often havn't tried a side hussle where you see 360 all the activities involved.

Building at scale without racking up big bill and hitting SLAs require a decent amount of effort.

At some point, most of your engineering time is spent on trying to understand what the previous team did. There's probably some engineer at Zendesk banging his head on the table because his boss wouldn't let him fix the sequential ticket IDs when he found them two months ago.

I work in one of the biggest companies of the world (employee and revenue wise) and it's basically a run-off reaction of well-articulated desk employees jerking each other off that, telling each other that they are so very important.

And the common management approach to anything not working immediately is "throw another 1.000 employees into the project" and the middle-managers measure their success by how many employees they are managing so it's a train without breaks. Hope it goes bankrupt soon.

Just re-watch Office Space..

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