We decided to make and sell crap. Why? Because we could get away with it. The quote re: autos — “Detroit decided that they would rather make money than cars.”

We decided to make and sell crap. Why? Because we could get away with it. The quote re: autos — “Detroit decided that they would rather make money than cars.” I'm not an economist, but I wouldn't be surprised if this had something to do with it. All the excitement about startups isn't just about getting rich and changing the world. It's also because everyone knows it's the only way a technical worker is allowed to actually think about improving the product. If you're in a big business, you aren't allowed to just improve the product. You're going to be kept busy doing things that improve the bottom line (really or just notionally) and half the time they make the product worse. But nobody says that, so you're dispirited by hypocrisy as well. Worst is when you actually use some of the products and services from your company, know that they're worse than the competitors, know that anybody paying the market price for them is getting ripped off, and have to listen to management talk about how hard everyone has to work to live up to MyMegaCorp standards of quality. That's how you take productive people and reprogram them not to care about their contribution to society anymore. I'm really enjoying the stability of MyMegaCorp for a change (the company I work for was acquired a year ago) but I don't think I'm going to last here much longer. And it could actually be much worse. At MyMegaCorp at least we all feel like we're on the same team. (No fooling; people reflexively cooperate.) At some big corporations, your team might actually intentionally sabotage product releases in order to make another team look bad. I've heard specific stories about documentation being intentionally obfuscated, vital product information being buried in obscure places, verbal commitments given and then intentionally broken and denied, and the most dramatic case, where resentment was so high that three teams knew a fourth team was making a large mistake and kept their mouths shut for months so the project would go down in flames and take the fourth manager with it.