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Comment by lifeinthevoid | Hacker News Reader

I'm so tired of seeing these comments where people assume they can accurately assess how many employees companies are supposed to have ...

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Personally I read it a little differently, more along the lines of "I didn't realise Nokia was that big! Are they involved in other sectors I don't know about?"

Within the context of HN that is 100% the wrong way to read it

is charitable interpretation dying out on HN as well?

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

When someone states "it makes me wonder what they all do", it is perfectly clear what they're implying.

At some point being "charitable" or "assuming good faith" starts to look like being deliberately obtuse.

Maybe on Reddit. Here, I instead did learn that Nokia still has a substantial worldwide stake in telecommunications, especially wireless. And that Nokia has much older origins than that dating back to selling rubber in the 19th century. even if their heyday of consumer products is long over, a few responses helped me see otherwise.

Regardless, the user already clarified their point so this is simply a thought exercise rather than a search for truth.

This is correct. All I know them from is their mobile phone business, which is all but gone nowadays. The Nokia brand lives on through HMD Global so I figured Nokia itself must do a ton of other stuff. I got a few replies with what they do nowadays, thanks!

I find people that don't read what is written a lot more tiring.

Where did I assume I can accurately assess how many employees Nokia is supposed to have?

So if you can't assess - why are you suprised about this particular number?

I would read his comment more as "I didn't know the company was still so big" than "wow how stupid are they that they didn't fire all those people years ago"

You don't need to accurately assess it to be surprised they still have a lot of employees. They don't seem to do much anymore that is visible. Quite a long time ago they were a leading company. I have no idea what they even do anymore.

If I could accurately assess the number, what is left for me to be surprised about? I would have all the data.

You could be surprised that the real number is bigger or smaller than whatever you assessed.

there are more inscects in a cubic mile of rural land than humans on earth. are you surprised?

Humans in general are horrible at encompassing large numbers. We can interpret and understand them, but our mental model sense of scale isn't flexed often enough in daily life (where we maybe deal with thousands at most) to truly appreciate hundreds of thousands, or millions intuitively.

To be fair, 86000 is the size of Meta. and I'm surprised to begin with that Meta has 86000 employees to begin with. They weren't saying that they shouldn't have that many employees, just unaware of the scale of the company.

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