I can chime in as part of the central team for SLAs, etc. We offer a platform to produce datasets given some inputs, SQL, and pushes to downstream systems. Standardized jobs are ran after the user’s SQL to produce standardized outputs.
It works well, but has many issues too. User’s SQLs and input data can differ, often in unpredictable ways, because they bring their own and expect the central team to handle the rest. Those edge cases break the standardization rules, fails the workflow, confuses the user because the platform is a black box, and they ask about changing it or adding a new feature. Now your standardization asks are bottle-necked by this central team, and the options are:
- to wait for the central team to fix/improve it
- find some hack around the platform
- don’t use the platform and its associated toolings, so you build it yourself and have another disjoint system for a specific use case
- central team might build a feature that one team asked for 1 years ago, but now nobody needs it anymore and nobody knows why it’s in code. Repeat many many times for various asks over the years and your code base is likely a foreign mess.
- give your resources/funding to the central team to prioritize your ask. When built and a few years later, the central team owns something they themselves never wanted.
> This is equivalent to saying, "All companies are evil; everything is subjective; let's just give up."
That’s my comment you quoted, and I already flat out wrote that this isn’t what I’m saying.
You might re-read what the original poster of this thread wrote, listing all the problems they see across a range of different industries and services.
Since it’s not clear to you, and since you made a comment about actively trying to stop me from sharing my opinion because it “wastes peoples time”, I’ll try to explain again. Hopefully if you still disagree, you’ll just downvote me instead of continuing with your personal attacks at me.
My point is that everyone has some set of values important to them. From a certain lens, you can find some fault or egregious (but perhaps legal) behavior in just about any large company. Corporations are complex. Even the best intentions result in some screw ups, or the leadership is well aware of an issue but does nothing because the bottom line is more important. Or maybe a certain issue coming to light may result in massive layoffs, etc etc.
To say are there any good companies isn’t productive of a topic in itself. What are your values? Maybe you believe FB is evil because it’s leadership knew about the impact of its services on teens and their mental health. Or maybe you believe that FB simply offers a product, and as long as no immediate law is broken, parents and families should moderate their child’s access to social media.
It works well, but has many issues too. User’s SQLs and input data can differ, often in unpredictable ways, because they bring their own and expect the central team to handle the rest. Those edge cases break the standardization rules, fails the workflow, confuses the user because the platform is a black box, and they ask about changing it or adding a new feature. Now your standardization asks are bottle-necked by this central team, and the options are:
- to wait for the central team to fix/improve it
- find some hack around the platform
- don’t use the platform and its associated toolings, so you build it yourself and have another disjoint system for a specific use case
- central team might build a feature that one team asked for 1 years ago, but now nobody needs it anymore and nobody knows why it’s in code. Repeat many many times for various asks over the years and your code base is likely a foreign mess.
- give your resources/funding to the central team to prioritize your ask. When built and a few years later, the central team owns something they themselves never wanted.