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Comment by Sleaker | Hacker News Reader

I'm at a large company that is building connections between all of its different financial systems. The primary problem being faced is NOT speed to code things, the primary problem at large companies is getting business aligned with tech (communication) and getting alignment across all the different orgs on data ownership, access, and security. AI currently doesn't solve any of this. Throw in needing to deal with regulation/SOX compliance and all the progress you think AI might make, just doesn't align with the problem domains.

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Totally makes sense. Turns out that a lot of what Palantir's "Forward Deployed Engineers" do is navigating these bureaucratic and political obstacles to get access to the data: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir -- which may be Palantir's real secret sauce, rather than the tech itself.

Agreed. The SWEs already receive a steady supply of conflicting demands from every possible business unit; the value add for these teams is a working PMO to prioritize the requests coming in.

This is also generally true for all mid to large businesses I've ever worked at.

The code they write is highly domain-specific, implementation speed is not the bottleneck, and their payroll for developers is nothing compared to the rest of the business.

AI would just increase risk for no reward.

> getting business aligned with tech (communication) and getting alignment across all the different orgs

This is what a CEO is supposed to do. I wonder if CEOs are the ones OK with their data being used and sent to large corps like MS, Oracle, etc.

I haven't seen what you're suggesting from a CEO at a large company that's primary business is non-software related. At some point in a businesses life theres an accumulation of so many disparate needs and systems that there can be many many layers of cross org needs for fulfilling business processes. This stuff is messy.

I think I saw it asserted that its easier for a new company, which definitely makes sense as you don't carry along all the baggage.

I work in large projects like this, the CEO doesn't get involved in the little "computer project" except during the project kickoff. Even then, it's just to "say a few words about the people I admire on this team". In large global companies these projects are delegated 3 or 4 levels below the CEO at the highest.

Makes me wonder if they are getting ripe for disruption. Not by a new business model, but a new operating model where a CEO will be tech/ai-aware and push through all these kinds of things.

There's definitely a market for on-prem solutions that don't involve sending all your data to someone else, while reaping the benefits.

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