Comment by nimbix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbix | Hacker News Reader

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The company I worked for had a pretty much identical experience with Unilever: they aggressively reduced the scope of the contract, but expected all the extras anyway; then at the end of the contract made the company choose between getting paid for all the overages, or extending the contract. They never even really needed us if you ask me; we were primarily used as a tool for one group of execs trying to one-up another group who was backing a competitor. Eventually it all lead to us having to integrate with that competing company... until said competitor suddnly went out of business (helped by their Unilever deal, no doubt). Of course the management's objective was keeping them as a client at any cost because having them as a reference would open up so many opportunities (it didn't really).

It will come as a surprise to many people, but it's quite possible to lose a ton of money on a toxic client who is paying you millions. Avoid such "white elephant" clients at any cost. And really, the last thing you need in your life is getting dragged into some huge conglomerate's internal politics.

I never worked with Singapore Airlines, but people who have experience with them tell me they're even worse in the sense that they allegedly have a policy of not paying for software - you get to give them free stuff in exchange for being able to list them as a client. Huge software companies can afford to do that; your growth stage startup probably can't.

Hah, a past SaaS “big startup/small enterprise” company I worked for also had Unilever as a customer, and they were also arguably our worst, most toxic customer. Constantly draining the time of everyone they interacted with. Managed to convince our execs to build a number of custom features just for them, that we spent a huge amount of time on, and they never used them (nor did our other customers).

I've encountered similar time-wasting behaviour with large companies, although not specifically Unilever.

In most cases I don't even think it's malicious: just that if you work somewhere in the middle of a giant corporation you forget the value of time. I suspect this is perhaps because it may take you years to deliver value for any initiative or project (assuming you can do it at all). Whereas smaller companies might be able to deliver the same value for themselves in days, weeks, or months so there's always this sense of momentum and urgency.

This is related to another theory I have about large corporations which is that if you work for them too long it robs you of initiative and possibly even makes you become stupid. Again, there are doubtless parts of these companies where this is more or less true, and possibly even some where it doesn't work this way at all, but I've had to deal with too many mid-level employees at large corporations now who simply can't get anything done, can't think for themselves, and for whom even the most basic of tasks can drag out for months. (It gets frustrating endlessly having to spoonfeed and restate next steps, and correct misunderstandings and misinformation.)

I realise this is quite a jaded view so I'd be happy to hear counterpoints.

I think this is the natural destination of bureaucracies, because the entire point of a bureaucracy is to reduce risk by creating a documented process for anything you could imagine wanting to do, leaving employees with no opportunities to think for themselves or be creative. So they just get to work, watch the clock, mindlessly follow the rules, and then go home. I suspect the lack of imagination required to work such a job draws people who prioritise stability and predictability over creativity.

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