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Comment by IX-103 | Hacker News Reader

You clearly never have worked in a large company. Changing a simple word can take weeks before it even goes to the translation team. Changing a disclaimer involves legal so expect a month of committee meetings before anything new is proposed.

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A friend told me this story: He works for a large company as a software developer. He made a PR to change a compiler setting. It was rejected because the build team believed it would cause them to have to add more machines to the build fleet, and they hadn’t met with the finance team to discuss that, yet. I wouldn’t have thought that changing a compiler setting would require capital expenditures, but here we are.

That sounds both plausible and also considerably dysfunctional from build team perspective

When your friend makes a PR to change compiler settings, it becomes a committee meeting. If the executive director says "GET RID OF THAT LINE ON THE WEBSITE ITS HURTING OUR BUSINESS" it's a 2 hour meeting between leadership, engineering, and legal, and communications and its done.

The speed of the change is proportional to personal authority within the organization of the person requesting the change. When ASUS says "we're working on it" what they mean is "leadership doesn't give a shit".

That's only when a mid-level or lower person/group wants to make a change. If it comes from the C-level, it gets done very quickly.

I work for an extremely large organization. All it takes is someone in higher levels to decide this has to be dealt with now. The working on it tells you that leadership doesn't really care.

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