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by noir_lord 39 days ago
Worked in enterprise for most of my career, uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it.

They basically never need 95% of it and most of it is never looked at again.

That 5% that does gets used ends up been collapsed to a single 100,000ft view somewhere that the decision makers in the company can see it and immediately treat as gospel.

Which is fun when you are the new hire, get asked to look at that dashboard and it turns out it's not calculating the totals correctly at all.

Then you have all the people in that business who collate reports for more senior report readers who never look at them but still collate them and those more senior report readers never pass it up anyway.

Enterprise is a serious weird kafakaesque place at times, it helps to just ignore the weirdness since you can't change it.

3 comments

But they get mad when you tell them that their processes are Kafkaesque!

Ask me how I know.

Learnt that one early, I optimise my own processes and my teams but the rest of the business that is on them.

Half surviving in big companies is knowing which battles are worth fighting and which aren’t.

How do you know?
I was scolded by my manager, who finished with the cliche, "we are open to suggestions for improvements"
if it doesn't impact the stock price, does it matter?
Does if it’s a private held company or contributes to profitability in either case.

Doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, a company can have all the inefficiency it can afford as long as I get paid and treat reasonably well it is not my concern how they allocate resources.

> uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it.

True, though collecting and keeping unnecessary _personal_ data is very much a liability under the GDPR.

Also it's increasingly a liability for potential ransom. The less sensitive data you keep, the lower your exposure to ransom demands, even if your systems have vulnerabilities (hint: they all do).