[yourapostasy]

Due to the lack of Operations having a real seat at the social hierarchy table at most companies, it isn't hard to see why you can have such a vast difference when dealing with many jurisdictions.

Here is how it works in most of my clients. Management is at the top of the heap. Business/sales/marketing comes next. Developers/engineering after them. Way down at the bottom of the heap, sits Operations. They're the "grunts".

The default dynamic is developers code up a system and toss it over the wall to Operations. When informed by operations of some edge case that comes up frequently on the sad path, developers roll their metaphorical eyes and tells Operations to "just" develop and follow some "SOP".

Cue "One Decade Later..." in French accent meme...

After enough of those edge cases over enough time, it isn't hard to see why all those manual intervention edge cases result in an operations-oriented staff bloat. These are especially challenging to address, because everyone is looking for a silver bullet and very few people in charge of writing checks will accept the reality that this is every bit as much technical debt as the code that runs on the systems, and working off that debt with interest is a slog of expensive unwinding.

Uber gets hit on multiple fronts with this dynamic. More jurisdictions, in an incumbent industry that has accreted more baroque government interfacing, that has simultaneously famously resisted making any of its relevant data available in any form whatsoever beyond paper and microfiche. Sometimes it will take more people than you can imagine.