4 ms·

As far as I can tell, being a big company manager is mostly defined by dealing with internal politics and attending a lot of meetings.

• joshkaufman 16y ago
  ^ This. I worked for a Fortune 50 for six years while building my business on the side. It was interesting for the first few years, then got old fast. There are two huge problems every big company has: 1. Communication Overhead - the more people you have to work with, the percentage of time you spend communicating with others vs. getting actual work done rises geometrically until it approaches 100%. You know you're getting there when you start having meetings to prepare for other meetings. 2. Bureaucracy - managers are on the hook for other people delivering things they may not understand and don't directly control, all while dealing with massive uncertainty. That's why there's so much bureaucracy - things like Gantt charts make managers feel better by creating the illusion of certainty and control, even though they mostly make things worse by reducing flexibility and speed. If you enjoy (and are good at) playing politics, big companies will be a good fit for you - that's what you'll spend most of your time doing every day. If you like spending most of your time creating useful things, don't work for a big company.
  • pasbesoin 16y ago
    Bureaucracy boils down to risk management -- for those participating in the bureaucracy. (I recognize and agree with what you describe. Just my spin on a nutshell perspective.)
  • Balsamic 16y ago
    I've spent the past two years working for one of the monolithic IT consulting firms. Communication overhead is something anyone attempting to understand enterprise software needs to grasp. Omnipresent meetings occur as an individual's defence mechanism. It is a mischaracterisation to treat it as a problem divorced from corporate structure, as they really are two sides to one coin. Holding a meeting keeps a paper trail of your attempts to solve a problem and dilutes responsibility across all those involved. Hence, despite the fact that all participants likely sit within ten metres of each other a meeting will still be scheduled: complete with calendar invites, hour-length time blocks (as less would not look like the issue is being given sufficient credence) and the scheduling of follow-up meetings. Additionally, enterprise projects do not consist of harmonious teams. Each team is akin to a project of its own: each with its own corporate structure, politics, budgets, risks and resources. I recently had a manager from one team demand I attend dual hour-long meetings per day for her team. I politely declined, stating that to do so my team would require an additional resource to cover this gap. This did not ingratiate me.
• dirtyaura 16y ago
  My point was to explore more about what big company management and leadership should be, not Dilbertsque rendition of non-working work environments. How would you organize e.g. Google to prevent it from growing to politics driven company like Microsoft seems to be (based on the recent Kin stories)? Or is it inevitable that big human organizations become these inefficient borgs after a certain size?
  • tomjen3 16y ago
    It is inevitable, as soon as you start brining in business people, since they are capable (and therefore will) start to play political games. It is simply the order of things. If you keep the company limited to producers (engineers, doctors, scientiests, etc) and kick out anybody who isn't producing (in the event that somebody took the job to make a paycheck, rather than because they like to produce), and you should be fine.