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Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

I think this is interesting because it collides my intuition from the pre-adtech world with the post. Surely collecting telemetry on nearly every mile you drive could never be a sensible use of time or money, right? What kind of insanity is that? But then of course I know that every click on every website is recorded for all time and that data must be many thousands of times less valuable.

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Worked in enterprise for most of my career, uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it.

They basically never need 95% of it and most of it is never looked at again.

That 5% that does gets used ends up been collapsed to a single 100,000ft view somewhere that the decision makers in the company can see it and immediately treat as gospel.

Which is fun when you are the new hire, get asked to look at that dashboard and it turns out it's not calculating the totals correctly at all.

Then you have all the people in that business who collate reports for more senior report readers who never look at them but still collate them and those more senior report readers never pass it up anyway.

Enterprise is a serious weird kafakaesque place at times, it helps to just ignore the weirdness since you can't change it.

But they get mad when you tell them that their processes are Kafkaesque!

Ask me how I know.

Learnt that one early, I optimise my own processes and my teams but the rest of the business that is on them.

Half surviving in big companies is knowing which battles are worth fighting and which aren’t.

How do you know?

I was scolded by my manager, who finished with the cliche, "we are open to suggestions for improvements"

if it doesn't impact the stock price, does it matter?

Does if it’s a private held company or contributes to profitability in either case.

Doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, a company can have all the inefficiency it can afford as long as I get paid and treat reasonably well it is not my concern how they allocate resources.

> uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it.

True, though collecting and keeping unnecessary _personal_ data is very much a liability under the GDPR.

Also it's increasingly a liability for potential ransom. The less sensitive data you keep, the lower your exposure to ransom demands, even if your systems have vulnerabilities (hint: they all do).

>Surely collecting telemetry on nearly every mile you drive could never be a sensible use of time or money, right? What kind of insanity is that?

They're not collecting in depth telemetry on every mile you drive, as you drive it. They're literally just every couple of days sending the number on the odometer up to their server. Most carmakers do it simply so they can sell you oil changes

This information is much more valuable to insurance companies than selling you some oil change (which hardly anyone gets from the manufacturer anyways).

Service is a way more lucrative line of business for dealers and manufacturers than you imagine. They may be trying to sell your data to insurance companies but for the most part they can't do that without telling you, and I've never been told that is happening, but I surely get an email from Jeep every month with the status of my tires and oil life remaining and a big sell pitch on taking it to my local Mopar dealer for service

You would be shocked the number of people who are utterly convinced that all servicing needs to be done at the dealership to maintain warranties, and how many dealerships will encourage this thinking, or outright try to deny warranty claims when a vehicle was not serviced by them.

> They're not collecting in depth telemetry on every mile you drive, as you drive it.

I mean, yes and no. It is most likely that the majority of carmakers are not collecting detailed telemetry. But we know from data breaches that some cars collect pretty detailed information.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a63306050/exposed-vw-data-...

They all do, minus one was merely bad:

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...

To me this is the singular drive behind AI development. Big shops realized they can collect orders of magnitude more data than they can keep up with, so they started pushing to develop more and more sophisticated algorithms to process it all. Eventually that lead to LLMs that (maybe someday) can ingest it all, process it all, and reason about it all.

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