> they're big unwieldy organisations and one part of the org can be doing things that would horrify and be stamped on hard by another part if they found out I

> they're big unwieldy organisations and one part of the org can be doing things that would horrify and be stamped on hard by another part if they found out I think people on "the outside" completely underestimate how true this is. If you've never worked at a 100K employee firm, and especially a bank.. its unimaginable. It sets up a lot of weird incentives, particularly for some rules/processes to seem very arbitrary and rigid. This is because the sample size is so big, they end up worrying about the worst thing the worst person could do. Inevitably this leads to backdoors and side channels to work around the standard processes because these processes make doing your job insufferably more difficult. For years we had chat apps which were horribly slow on desktop and had no mobile app, while we all had iPhones/Androids in our pockets. An anecdote would be that at one bank I worked, releasing a new version of our application required filling out a change request form. This form was a desktop app which was multi-page, multi-tab, with pop-up modals. There were radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down selectors, and free form text fields. Once certain parts were completed, you couldn't go back and correct them if wrong and had to start again. We had 1-2 out of 20 devs good at filling out the form, and it took 45 minutes. We then had to chase 5+ MD-level (don't read email / chat / etc) to click the approve button between then & when we wanted to release. We budgeted a week to chase these guys. Again if we failed to get approvals it went back to square 0 and start over on the form again.