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Comment by coderatlarge | Hacker News Reader

“When you have four or five layers between the client and the actual worker, each taking a cut, it becomes impossible to track where influence ends and legitimate business begins."

wow i would think that for all the money paid to ERP vendors tracking five layers of contracts would not be a major issue.

but i guess unless people in positions of authority subject themselves to some sort of financial audit then it’s almost impossible to detect corruption related payments.

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When I worked for a B2B startup years ago (VR sector, hype of the moment back then), it was common to have our bid/proposal rejected in favor of a larger company that would then hire us to make the full project for a fraction of the price.

I wouldn’t be surprised to know there were agreements between this bigger company and the person in charge of selecting a contractor, it seems to be an extremely common practice.

Sounds more like covering your ass. Instead of hiring some startup, get a large company. It's not your money, and if the startup fail,s you don't have a real excuse. If a giant corpo fails the project, it's not your fault.

> If a giant corpo fails the project, it's not your fault.

Why does this make sense? Failing is failing. The only reason it could be true is that the giant corpo has deep projects to pay back for the failure (in theory) but does that work in practice? They've got lawyers for their lawyers and more lawyers for those lawyers. Guess who is going to out lawyer who.

You paid extra for the large, experienced corporation to do it. If it failed, it was outside of your power since they have a reputation and resources, but it just did not work out.

Startups have no reputation. If they fail, you'll be asked why you picked them, and any answer you give is based on your judgment of their abilities, which was wrong since they failed. If you say it was to get X done cheaper, you're the cheapskate who wasted X$ trying to save Y$.

There are also very often situations where your corpo has used corpo X for 5 prior/current projects and is satisfied, so picking them also gives you the backing of those other projects, should something go wrong.

It partially makes sense, but it's also largely office politics. You really don't want to have a complex explanation when you're in the crosshairs of some angry bossman 2 tiers above your boss.

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Buying bigger for more money just isn't perceived as risky as buying small and unproven for little.

There’s also the “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM” effect. If they hire a small vendor and the project fails, that might be a resume-generating event for the person responsible for that choice. But if you choose a big vendor and it fails you’re probably safe.

"Only at this point did Brady realize that it was the CEO himself who was fiddling with the numbers. The entire dual reporting system that the CEO had personally initiated was in part an elaborate spy network to guard against discovery of the slush fund manipulation, and perhaps other finagling, rather than a system to ensure financial honesty."

- Moral Mazes (1988), Robert Jackall

I just read that book and I can't believe it's not more well-known in tech circles

5 layers of contracts is a lot of reputation and responsibility laundering

(and sometimes it's by design)

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