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Depends I think - big companies are vastly more efficient than small companies at certain things. To give a personal example from a FAANG, where I work at, web

Depends I think - big companies are vastly more efficient than small companies at certain things. To give a personal example from a FAANG, where I work at, web developers don't have to worry much about a lot of the ops infrastructure - a lot of that work is offloaded to another org whose sole responsibility is to have a robust setup for the whole company. We don't have to reinvent the wheel for things like CI/CD, and such nice features like deploy on a pull request basis. The main inefficiency I see is that large organizations take time to make the decision of whether something is the right thing to build. Once the decision has been made, the implementation happens much faster than what small companies can match that I've seen - my own employer moves frightfully fast compared to any startup I've worked for. From personal experience, I see small companies constantly struggle with trying to standardize these things, and often solve these problems in a way that causes long term iteration pain. Oftentimes the engineers aren't good enough to solve many of these problems, and the short-termism of feature development strangles a lot of proper solution building, which actually leads to a lot of inefficiency. A lot of times, small companies also often take shortcuts that bigger companies cannot take. For example, internationalization and accessibility may be minimum requirements at some bigger companies, whereas small companies may not be hamstrung with supporting those fully for their customers, if at all.

lliamander 8y ago
This was more or less the answer I was going to give. In short: big companies are more efficient at repeated things. Small companies can be more efficient at novel things.
doomjunky 8y ago
I'm d’accord with that. I think many comments here have a misconception of efficiency versus flexibility. For me it breaks down to: - Big companies are: More efficient but less flexible - Small startups are: Less efficient but more flexible Big companies are more efficient because every employee has a narrow field of responsibilities. They are dedicated to just a few tasks and can leveradge from focusing their minds on just one thing (e.g. a web developer who is just responsible for programming his mobule). Compared to a small inefficient startup, were every employee has a broad spectrum of responsibilities and needs to refocus his mind often (e.g. a web developer who has not only programming tasks, but also system administration, setup/deployement, UI design, customer support and cleaning the coffee machine and fixing the printer). Small startups are more flexible because everybody can directly give new ideas to the boss, everybody has knowledge about the whole company and how everything is tied together and changes to processes or infrastructure can easily be adopted. I think this situation is not a bad thing. Big companies and small startups live in symbiosis. Startups are flexible enough to produce new innovations. Then they either grow big (implement processes, standards, hierarchies, etc.) or get acquired by a big company. However, big companies are not flexible enough to produce new innovations but they have the resources to found spin-offs / create new startups.

lliamander 8y ago

This was more or less the answer I was going to give. In short: big companies are more efficient at repeated things. Small companies can be more efficient at novel things.

doomjunky 8y ago

I'm d’accord with that. I think many comments here have a misconception of efficiency versus flexibility. For me it breaks down to: - Big companies are: More efficient but less flexible - Small startups are: Less efficient but more flexible Big companies are more efficient because every employee has a narrow field of responsibilities. They are dedicated to just a few tasks and can leveradge from focusing their minds on just one thing (e.g. a web developer who is just responsible for programming his mobule). Compared to a small inefficient startup, were every employee has a broad spectrum of responsibilities and needs to refocus his mind often (e.g. a web developer who has not only programming tasks, but also system administration, setup/deployement, UI design, customer support and cleaning the coffee machine and fixing the printer). Small startups are more flexible because everybody can directly give new ideas to the boss, everybody has knowledge about the whole company and how everything is tied together and changes to processes or infrastructure can easily be adopted. I think this situation is not a bad thing. Big companies and small startups live in symbiosis. Startups are flexible enough to produce new innovations. Then they either grow big (implement processes, standards, hierarchies, etc.) or get acquired by a big company. However, big companies are not flexible enough to produce new innovations but they have the resources to found spin-offs / create new startups.