4 ms·

No one knows anything in big companies Lots of smart, talented and energetic people are expending most of their power just figuring out who to talk to about wh

No one knows anything in big companies Lots of smart, talented and energetic people are expending most of their power just figuring out who to talk to about what or what the hell that out-of-the-blue email from corporate finance means for them. Just figuring out how to get a thing done can be exhausting.

carlivar 8y ago
So, Dunbar's Number
Scene_Cast2 8y ago
Yep, can attest to this. One of the reasons why senior people are extremely productive & valuable is that they seem to know the landscape more than others, and therefore know who to talk to & where to look. Half-jokingly, as soon as an "individual contributor" knows enough to be productive, they're promoted to management.
- csydas 8y ago
  WRT the half-joke, this is one of those truisms that probably has a lot of basis in reality, but there needs to be a corollary about the choice of the individual as well. I was heavily invested in our public facing technical side, working a lot with our on-boarding, teaching newbies to be really self-sufficient, working through the technical issues with our clients directly, and then I was asked to take on a Management position. I liked the pay raise, but I made it clear exactly what I wanted from the position, and though we butt heads on it still, my boss respects the fact that I still am heavily invested with our technical team while doing the Managerial work. We had to revisit the job definition a few times to find a description that matched what I was (am) doing and also made HR happy, but we did it. The point is that in some cases at least, a promotion to management doesn't have to be a death knell for "individual contributors". It depends on the company's willingness to accommodate the wants of the individual, and the individual's own desire to continue contributing. I know too many people who did get the Management golden ticket and relished it for just being an excuse to boss people around and make more dashboards in our CRM.
  - opportune 8y ago
    At the same time, I have read from people making the transition from IC to manager that it's a mistake to hold on to your technical work. Surely this will vary from person to person, company to company, and team to team, but I find it hard to believe that people with 10-15+ years of professional dev experience are best utilizing their skills sitting far away from the code; at the same time, they can't get too focused on it and ignore their management responsibilities. I wonder how much of it has to do with team sizes. I feel like a 4 person team (inclusive) would be ideal for a manager who also wanted to act as a technical lead and contribute a moderate amount. Any bigger, and the scope of what your team does, as well as the amount of time needed to devote enough time to all your employees, starts to get too big for you to contribute at a technical (e.g. source code) level. Yet we continue to take great technical workers and put them in this weird PM-hiring-HR-architect mixture of a position where they barely continue to leverage their skills anyway
rhymenoceros 8y ago
I think it's a little more subtle than that. In the context of a startup, if you try something and fail, you'll generally be recognized for taking initiative even if the result does not pan out. At that level, learning what doesn't work is often as valuable as learning what does work. Startups often bias towards hiring people with just this mentality because that is what they actually need. In the context of an established company, sticking your neck out is like career suicide unless it's a sure thing. Unlike a startup, you're risking an _established_ reputation on a new idea. So you end up working in an organization that has an inherently different view of risk and trying new things. I'm not sure whether "nobody knows how to do anything" results from an institutional aversion to risk or from the natural result of hiring people that fit within that system, but the end effect is exactly as you describe. It's way too hard to do anything off of the beaten path, and trying to do anything along those lines _immediately_ results in negative feedback which makes employees a lot less likely to attempt such actions in the future.
- kochikame 8y ago
  Good points. In my comment, I was focused on the difficulties around getting the information you need and being aware of what is happening in other parts of the company, but there is also the huge factor around punishing risk-takers too. For example, I can build a chatbot in a day that will take some load of a bunch of people in my department. Will it be deployed? No way. Will it be seen as a possible threat to people's patronage networks by cutting their teams and budgets? You bet. Will I possibly be chastised for doing something that is not in my JD? Possibly. Will I bother making it in this case? Nope.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Outside of delivering a new development or product that might need someone to stick their neck out, the larger the company mostly the worse they get at everything. Sales, support, raising an invoice, paying your bill, correcting a mistake, you name it. To customers it really does seem as simple as passing Dunbar's number means support will probably suck or border on non-existant, pre-sales questions will go unanswered or get a process driven irrelevant answer, invoice payment gets ever more lax, and so on. Or maybe it's that companies smaller than this still have enough people around that care.
jerf 8y ago
"No one knows anything in big companies" It's important not to so thoroughly explain the problems that big companies have that you argue them right out of existence, because they clearly exist and as others point out, actually routinely pull off feats that no startup could dream of.
dandare 8y ago
I was wondering if this is happening only in my company. I am frustrated and outraged that there is no easy way to find out who is responsible for X, nor what is person Y responsible for. I wrote and email to our CIO, explaining my struggle, but he does not seem to care.

carlivar 8y ago

So, Dunbar's Number

Scene_Cast2 8y ago

Yep, can attest to this. One of the reasons why senior people are extremely productive & valuable is that they seem to know the landscape more than others, and therefore know who to talk to & where to look. Half-jokingly, as soon as an "individual contributor" knows enough to be productive, they're promoted to management.

csydas 8y ago
WRT the half-joke, this is one of those truisms that probably has a lot of basis in reality, but there needs to be a corollary about the choice of the individual as well. I was heavily invested in our public facing technical side, working a lot with our on-boarding, teaching newbies to be really self-sufficient, working through the technical issues with our clients directly, and then I was asked to take on a Management position. I liked the pay raise, but I made it clear exactly what I wanted from the position, and though we butt heads on it still, my boss respects the fact that I still am heavily invested with our technical team while doing the Managerial work. We had to revisit the job definition a few times to find a description that matched what I was (am) doing and also made HR happy, but we did it. The point is that in some cases at least, a promotion to management doesn't have to be a death knell for "individual contributors". It depends on the company's willingness to accommodate the wants of the individual, and the individual's own desire to continue contributing. I know too many people who did get the Management golden ticket and relished it for just being an excuse to boss people around and make more dashboards in our CRM.
- opportune 8y ago
  At the same time, I have read from people making the transition from IC to manager that it's a mistake to hold on to your technical work. Surely this will vary from person to person, company to company, and team to team, but I find it hard to believe that people with 10-15+ years of professional dev experience are best utilizing their skills sitting far away from the code; at the same time, they can't get too focused on it and ignore their management responsibilities. I wonder how much of it has to do with team sizes. I feel like a 4 person team (inclusive) would be ideal for a manager who also wanted to act as a technical lead and contribute a moderate amount. Any bigger, and the scope of what your team does, as well as the amount of time needed to devote enough time to all your employees, starts to get too big for you to contribute at a technical (e.g. source code) level. Yet we continue to take great technical workers and put them in this weird PM-hiring-HR-architect mixture of a position where they barely continue to leverage their skills anyway

rhymenoceros 8y ago

I think it's a little more subtle than that. In the context of a startup, if you try something and fail, you'll generally be recognized for taking initiative even if the result does not pan out. At that level, learning what doesn't work is often as valuable as learning what does work. Startups often bias towards hiring people with just this mentality because that is what they actually need. In the context of an established company, sticking your neck out is like career suicide unless it's a sure thing. Unlike a startup, you're risking an _established_ reputation on a new idea. So you end up working in an organization that has an inherently different view of risk and trying new things. I'm not sure whether "nobody knows how to do anything" results from an institutional aversion to risk or from the natural result of hiring people that fit within that system, but the end effect is exactly as you describe. It's way too hard to do anything off of the beaten path, and trying to do anything along those lines _immediately_ results in negative feedback which makes employees a lot less likely to attempt such actions in the future.

kochikame 8y ago
Good points. In my comment, I was focused on the difficulties around getting the information you need and being aware of what is happening in other parts of the company, but there is also the huge factor around punishing risk-takers too. For example, I can build a chatbot in a day that will take some load of a bunch of people in my department. Will it be deployed? No way. Will it be seen as a possible threat to people's patronage networks by cutting their teams and budgets? You bet. Will I possibly be chastised for doing something that is not in my JD? Possibly. Will I bother making it in this case? Nope.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Outside of delivering a new development or product that might need someone to stick their neck out, the larger the company mostly the worse they get at everything. Sales, support, raising an invoice, paying your bill, correcting a mistake, you name it. To customers it really does seem as simple as passing Dunbar's number means support will probably suck or border on non-existant, pre-sales questions will go unanswered or get a process driven irrelevant answer, invoice payment gets ever more lax, and so on. Or maybe it's that companies smaller than this still have enough people around that care.

jerf 8y ago

"No one knows anything in big companies" It's important not to so thoroughly explain the problems that big companies have that you argue them right out of existence, because they clearly exist and as others point out, actually routinely pull off feats that no startup could dream of.

dandare 8y ago

I was wondering if this is happening only in my company. I am frustrated and outraged that there is no easy way to find out who is responsible for X, nor what is person Y responsible for. I wrote and email to our CIO, explaining my struggle, but he does not seem to care.