[cosmie]

As you said, every capable manager learns how to work the system for when the situation warrants it.

I currently work (as an employee) for a marketing agency doing analytics consulting work, and we're frequently used as a backdoor to get around internal controls, be it hiring specific subcontractors or unapproved technology. Because the SOW that allowed for (and specified) that passthrough cost gets approved by their legal team, it's an unofficial way for many of our clients to both stay within the lines while simultaneously bypassing internal roadblocks. A particular favorite example of mine was helping a client swap out their janky WAF with Cloudflare, and using Cloudflare Workers to do some magic header rewriting to solve a longstanding issue of theirs. It solved a business-impacting issue that had been plaguing the marketing team, and the client's networking team was super excited to work with me on it as they'd been wanting kick the tires of Cloudflare but couldn't ever get it pushed through.

That said, the situation I mentioned in the above comment is typically the official process at many Big Corps (at least in the US, where the contractor vs. employee classification is a very big deal[1]). Some Big Corps are less risk averse, and virtually every Big Corp has tribal knowledge among the management on how to get things done when they need to. But you can generally avoid the issue entirely by focusing prospecting efforts downmarket at smaller enterprises.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...