<story><title>Why big tech companies need so many people</title><url>https://thebuilderjr.substack.com/p/why-big-tech-companies-need-so-many</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rippercushions</author><text>This post seems kind of naive?  A big part of why big tech companies need so many people is because &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; big company, especially one sitting on piles of money, becomes a target for all sorts of predators and has to defend itself.  So it has to have armies of SOX compliance officers (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than getting sued by the SEC), travel expense auditors (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than shareholder suits after a VP whoops it up in Vegas and sends the bill to the company), mandatory diversity training educators (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than getting sued by various minorities), patent litigation departments (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than losing to patent trolls) etc etc, all of which feel like &amp;quot;bullshit jobs&amp;quot; to the average 3-man startup because the average 3-man startup doesn&amp;#x27;t face any of these problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ethanbond</author><text>Ugh, it’s so much simpler than that.&lt;p&gt;Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; individual life easier. Full stop. The most obvious way to do that, if you have the ability&amp;#x2F;budget, is to hire people to do your work for you.&lt;p&gt;Then you can brag about managing higher headcount, you do less work, and you flounder around as a very bad manager with no accountability so long as you keep your workload below the level of &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; manager (who, remember, hired you just to remove work from their own plate).&lt;p&gt;Now remember that everyone you hired has the exact same incentive.&lt;p&gt;It keeps going til the money runs out or until the company buckles under its own organizational complexity.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why big tech companies need so many people</title><url>https://thebuilderjr.substack.com/p/why-big-tech-companies-need-so-many</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rippercushions</author><text>This post seems kind of naive?  A big part of why big tech companies need so many people is because &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; big company, especially one sitting on piles of money, becomes a target for all sorts of predators and has to defend itself.  So it has to have armies of SOX compliance officers (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than getting sued by the SEC), travel expense auditors (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than shareholder suits after a VP whoops it up in Vegas and sends the bill to the company), mandatory diversity training educators (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than getting sued by various minorities), patent litigation departments (because it&amp;#x27;s still cheaper than losing to patent trolls) etc etc, all of which feel like &amp;quot;bullshit jobs&amp;quot; to the average 3-man startup because the average 3-man startup doesn&amp;#x27;t face any of these problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>threeseed</author><text>This comment is like a Fox News parody of what tech companies are like.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve worked for a few and there definitely wasn&amp;#x27;t 1000s of people in the Legal &amp;amp; Compliance departments constantly getting sued and harassing managers and engineers about travel expenses or diversity training.&lt;p&gt;Instead, it is the exact same problems you see at every large company i.e. excess of middle managers each trying to grow their own fiefdom and duplicating capabilities across the organisation.&lt;p&gt;Or it&amp;#x27;s too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&amp;amp;D adventures.</text></comment>