3 ms·
There are a hundred valid answers to this question. Here's one that I think is a major factor: What is the degree of separation between the engineer, and the pe
by whack 9y ago
There are a hundred valid answers to this question. Here's one that I think is a major factor: What is the degree of separation between the engineer, and the people who benefit most from the engineer's work?
If you're a startup founder, you eat what you kill. There is no degree of separation at all.
If you're working at a 10-person startup, you report directly to the founder. 1 degree of separation.
At a 50 person startup, you probably report to someone who reports to the founder. 2 degrees of separation.
At a place like Microsoft, you're probably 7-8 degrees removed from the CEO, who himself reports to the board-of-directors, who report to a decentralized mob of shareholders.
At every degree of separation, there is an amplification of:
- distortion of incentives
- "Not my job"
- "that decision is above my paygrade"
- "What's in it for me?"
I don't think individual productivity can ever be as high in mega-corps, the way they are in startups and smaller teams. Hence why mega-corps are generally best at milking existing cash-cows, whereas startups are much better at actually driving innovations.
- mark-r 9y agoYou need to go one step further and ask yourself why there are these degrees of separation if they're harmful to productivity? The answer lies in the communication overhead as someone else said, combined with Dunbar's number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
- notacoward 9y agoMisalignment (not quite the same as distortion) of incentives is a big factor. In a small company, if somebody is doing something that doesn't contribute positively to the end result, it's super easy to notice. In a larger company, people or even whole large-ish organizations can be doing this and it's harder to notice because there's so many people legitimately moving in so many different directions. This can happen even when everybody involved has the very best of intentions. All of those fish swimming the wrong way do have a negative effect on efficiency, though.
- lopmotr 9y agoIf that were really true though, wouldn't a big company solve it by splitting itself apart into smaller parallel units all doing the same job as each other but with shorter hierarchies and not wasting time communicating with each other? I think economies of scale still overwhelms the chain-of-command losses you described and makes big companies more efficient overall.
- vokep 9y agomight just be big (Big! like google) companies have only been around for so long. I don't know of any company that has tried something like that, maybe it would work great!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]