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It's more complicated than that. Largely, it just seems that way because most people never bother to understand the rules past a cursory Google whereas big comp

It's more complicated than that. Largely, it just seems that way because most people never bother to understand the rules past a cursory Google whereas big companies have teams of very experienced regulatory professionals from the agencies themselves who are all about it and therefore know every way to tweak inputs so that they trigger certain regulations rather than others. I was working on a regulatory compliance product for a bit and the first thing I did was pull every applicable regulation, standard, and rule governing the space and read them. This took about a month and made me much more knowledgeable than the vast majority of people in the field who didn't even try. Being an expert is about taking the time to sit down and read the RFCs, basically. We don't have many experts because no one wants to do it.

roel_v 7y ago
This is so true. I got a law degree as a hobby while working as a software developer. The actual substantive knowledge I got from that hasn't been very useful so far (apart from the occasional online flex...), but the skills I learned to do what you describe have been a real USP for me. Now law school didn't explicitly teach me those skills; there was never a course where someone taught 'how to go deep on any subject'. It was more learned through osmosis, and maybe some aspect of seeing the meta as well. Seeing a few times how rules are never what they seem at first, and that you need to understand the full landscape to really understand, apply and abuse them is the underlying experience/skill. (come to think of it, maybe this is exactly the meta but just looking at it from another side... hmm...)
- porknubbins 7y ago
  As a lawyer I had the reverse experience, programming taught me to go deep. Plenty of mediocre lawyers don’t chase depth of understanding to the nth degree, but trying to understand, debug, and work in a new codebase taught me detective work at a new level that absolutely cannot be replaced with bs or the program won’t work.
fwip 7y ago
If you don't have money, you can spend a lot of time becoming proficient in the field, and maybe find a loophole or two, and assure yourself you are in compliance. If you have money, you can afford the compliance experts to find you every loophole. If you have even more money, you can get new holes written into regulation, tailored specifically for you.
hi_im_miles 7y ago
I think the fact that it took an entire month to understand how to reach compliance speaks to the "pay to win" nature of regulatory barriers-to-entry.
- Thriptic 7y ago
  It's a complicated situation. In our case, the regulations were complicated because: 1. There was no one place that held all the data one was expected to know. Regs were strewn over legislative artifacts, departmental implementatikn documents, best practice documents, and international standards. Also, more than one class of regulations potentially covered efforts in the space. There was also no one site listing the locations of everything. 2. The regulations had evolved from an earlier time where an existing regulatory framework was adopted to try to fit new classes of things, and the mapping didn't work perfectly. 3. The regulations were written in a very high level manner to allow freedom of implementation and to make sure that the regulations didn't constrain tech development. Unfortunately, that meant that there were no suggested implementations which made it difficult for new entrants to the space (especially startups who can't afford to hire consultants) to understand how to actually comply simply. 4. There was ambiguity about what systems fit into which regulatory class as systems were advancing quickly and were changing state over time (ie updates) so traditional regulatory class lines were blurring. That is where we stepped in. We were making a product that was ambiguously regulated and so we pulled the regs to understand them. Once we figured out how time consuming this was, we tried to make a software system to provide suggested basic implementations to be compliant and which helped companies properly bin their products into regulatory classes. Ultimately the entire regulatory system was changed rendering our product irrelevant, but I hope this shows why the system was as complicated as it was and helps demonstrate that the complexity was not a function of large players going for regulatory barriers to entry but rather a result of natural evolution and technical advancement over time which rendered existing regulations poorly suited for the current environment.

roel_v 7y ago

This is so true. I got a law degree as a hobby while working as a software developer. The actual substantive knowledge I got from that hasn't been very useful so far (apart from the occasional online flex...), but the skills I learned to do what you describe have been a real USP for me. Now law school didn't explicitly teach me those skills; there was never a course where someone taught 'how to go deep on any subject'. It was more learned through osmosis, and maybe some aspect of seeing the meta as well. Seeing a few times how rules are never what they seem at first, and that you need to understand the full landscape to really understand, apply and abuse them is the underlying experience/skill. (come to think of it, maybe this is exactly the meta but just looking at it from another side... hmm...)

porknubbins 7y ago
As a lawyer I had the reverse experience, programming taught me to go deep. Plenty of mediocre lawyers don’t chase depth of understanding to the nth degree, but trying to understand, debug, and work in a new codebase taught me detective work at a new level that absolutely cannot be replaced with bs or the program won’t work.

fwip 7y ago

If you don't have money, you can spend a lot of time becoming proficient in the field, and maybe find a loophole or two, and assure yourself you are in compliance. If you have money, you can afford the compliance experts to find you every loophole. If you have even more money, you can get new holes written into regulation, tailored specifically for you.

hi_im_miles 7y ago

I think the fact that it took an entire month to understand how to reach compliance speaks to the "pay to win" nature of regulatory barriers-to-entry.

Thriptic 7y ago
It's a complicated situation. In our case, the regulations were complicated because: 1. There was no one place that held all the data one was expected to know. Regs were strewn over legislative artifacts, departmental implementatikn documents, best practice documents, and international standards. Also, more than one class of regulations potentially covered efforts in the space. There was also no one site listing the locations of everything. 2. The regulations had evolved from an earlier time where an existing regulatory framework was adopted to try to fit new classes of things, and the mapping didn't work perfectly. 3. The regulations were written in a very high level manner to allow freedom of implementation and to make sure that the regulations didn't constrain tech development. Unfortunately, that meant that there were no suggested implementations which made it difficult for new entrants to the space (especially startups who can't afford to hire consultants) to understand how to actually comply simply. 4. There was ambiguity about what systems fit into which regulatory class as systems were advancing quickly and were changing state over time (ie updates) so traditional regulatory class lines were blurring. That is where we stepped in. We were making a product that was ambiguously regulated and so we pulled the regs to understand them. Once we figured out how time consuming this was, we tried to make a software system to provide suggested basic implementations to be compliant and which helped companies properly bin their products into regulatory classes. Ultimately the entire regulatory system was changed rendering our product irrelevant, but I hope this shows why the system was as complicated as it was and helps demonstrate that the complexity was not a function of large players going for regulatory barriers to entry but rather a result of natural evolution and technical advancement over time which rendered existing regulations poorly suited for the current environment.