I have met with a lot of people from many different countries discussing stories from a whole range of companies. It wouldn’t really be fair to highlight shortcuts taken by a startup who are almost always by definition are on a shoestring budget. Yet, once a company grows so large that they pretty much dwarf all of their national competition it seems that you should be able to take the gloves off.
I did some consulting through a multi-national telephone company with offices on virtually every continent on the planet earth. I think that they can probably handle some good natured ribbing.
In Germany every few years some company gets sued by one of their freelancers claiming to be an employee. It wouldn’t be a worry for the companies except that sometimes these cases don’t go in their favor and the company is forced to take these people and make them their employee. Thus to prevent such a horrible thing from happening the companies try to ensure that they treat these external resources people in a manner that is not like an employee.
Well, in 2013 in an attempt to really make this a much more stringent process they instituted forms asking all sorts of questions designed to highlight people who might be a problem on the horizon. I understand their concern from a business level but what I found to be too funny was that either the auditors that they were hiring to do this task1 or the internal staff decided to improve the form from one year to the next.
Rather than consider a new angle of questioning, or a clever rephrasing of the existing questions they took a different approach all together. The form is an adobe acrobat PDF so that the user can edit to include all their useful answers print it out and sign it. The change was to increase the font size for four of the answer fields and adding a version number to the form. Other than this, there appears to be no noticeable change in any of the questions presented.
I guess when a company with only 60 billion2 Euros revenue really wants to take something serious they change the font size on a form.
1What do this task themselves? Nah, outsource the task.
2If my figures are correct it was actually 60.13 billion euros for 2013.