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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes moving fast in a large org boils down to finding a succinct way to tell the lawyer "I understand what you're saying, but that's not consistent with my understanding of the legality of the issue, so I will proceed with my work. If you want to block my process, the escalation path is through my manager."

(I have more than once had to explain to a lawyer that their understanding was wrong, and they were imposing unnecessary extra practice)

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Raises the question though, why is the lawyer talking to you in the first place, and not your manager?

Isn't that the point of these layoffs? Less obfuscation and games of telephone? The more layers introduces inherent lag.

The real question is, how/why did they over-hire in the first place?

> The real question is, how/why did they over-hire in the first place place

This question has been answered many times. Time to move on and fix forward.

I havent seen a single answer that isnt surface level stuff.

Reasons in the press over the last two years or so are due to factors like aggressive growth projections, the availability of cheap capital, and the pandemic-driven surge in demand for online services.

But why do YOU care? Are you trying learn so you can avoid such traps in your own company that you run? Maybe you are trying to understand because you’ve been affected? Or maybe some other reason?

Well, let's give a concrete example. I want to use an SaaS as part of my job. My manager knows this and supports it. In the process of me trying to sign up for the SaaS, I have to contact various groups in the company- the cost center folks to get an approval for spending the money to get the SaaS, the security folk to ensure we're not accidentally leaking IP to the outside world, the legal folks to make sure the contract negotiations go smoothly.

Why would the lawyer need to talk to my manager? I'm the person getting the job done, my manager is there to support me and to resolve conflicts in case of escalations. In the meantime, I'm going to explain patiently to the lawyer that the terms they are insisting on aren't necessary (I always listen carefully to what the lawyer says).

So then the poor lawyer thinks "so why the hell did you ask me?"

> I have to contact various groups in the company- the cost center folks to get an approval for spending the money to get the SaaS, the security folk to ensure we're not accidentally leaking IP to the outside world, the legal folks to make sure the contract negotiations go smoothly.

I guess I was assuming (maybe wrongly) that you are an engineer/developer of some sort. All of that work sounds like manager work to me. Why is an IC dealing with all of that bureaucratic stuff? Doesn't they all ultimately need your manager's approval anyway?

I only started managing people recently (and still do some engineering and development, along with various project management- my job title is "Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer - so not really even a management track).

I have a lot of experience doing this sort of work (IE, some product management, project management, customer/stakeholder relationships, vendor relationships, telling the industrial contractor where to cut a hole in the concrete for the fiber, changing out the RAM on a storage server in the data center, negotiate a multi-million dollar contract with AWS, give a presentation at re:Invent to get a discount on AWS, etc) because really, my goal is to make things happen using all my talents.

I work with my manager- I keep him up to date on stuff, but if I feel strongly about things, and document my thinking, I can generally move with a fair level of autonomy.

It's been that way throughout my career- although I would love to just sit around and work on code I think is useful, I've always had to carry out lots of extra tasks. Starting as a scientist, I had to deal with writing grants and networking at conferences more than I had time to sit around in the lab running experiments or writing code. Later, working as an IC in various companies, I always found that challenging things got done quicker if I just did them myself rather than depending on somebody else in my org to do it.

"Manager" means different things, btw. There's people managers, product managers, project managers, resource managers. Many of those roles are implemented by IC engineer/developers.

"Manager" means different things, btw.

Certainly, and its interesting to see your perspective. At most of my jobs, if I needed a subscription to a SaaS (the earlier example) I'd tell my manager, explain my reasons, and they'd deal with purchasing, legal, security, etc. as needed, maybe looping me in if there was a technical question they could not answer.

A lot of times, they do. But where I'm at, lawyers have the last say for some reason. A good example is our sub/sister companies. Our lawyers told us that we needed separate physical servers for their fucking VMs and IAM. We have a fucking data center and they wanted us to buy new hardware.

We fought and tried to explain that what they were asking didn't even make sense, all of our data and IAM is already under the same M365 tenant and other various cloud services. We can't take that apart, it's just not possible.

They wouldn't listen and are completely incapable of understanding so we just said "ok, fine" and I was told to just ignore them.

The details were forgotten in the quagmire of meetings and paperwork, and the sun rose the next day in spite of our clueless 70+ year old legal team.

Your lawyers were probably right, i can see plenty of situations where this would be necessary to strength the notion that the sister company is independent. Sometimes you do not care, but there are situations where this independence is key.

Also keep in mind that if you go court, the judge will be in his 70s as well so is likely to interpret things the same way your lawyers do.

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