9 ms·

Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger

Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically. Any individual interface element might have taken input from as many as 100+ different people over many years, each with competing interests and goals (no, I'm not joking). Combine this with the precedents and decisions made on projects in the past (design debt), and you end up with stupid outcomes like this. As a multiple FAANG alumni, I've seen this firsthand hundreds of times. I think it's cute that people think IC designers or engineers have the power to make any real decisions inside large organizations. What's more likely, is these stupid icons were part of some design system somebody created 7 years ago (have to stay consistent of course!). The circular floating buttons were a precedent somebody set 5 years ago on a completely different product (god forbid it feels "off-brand"). The colors were set 6 years ago on some project where this kind of application was never thought of. And finally, the order & placement of the icons was changed 15 times by some PM, then the PM's boss, then the accessibility guys, then the brand team, the brand team's boss, then the director of marketing, etc. etc. The tie breaking vote going to whoever is perceived as having more soft power inside the org at the time. Hence, the inevitable outcome of big company stupidity.

dimitrios1 6y ago
> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  I think the mean arrives a lot sooner than that. The situation where PMs and managers and goddamn copy writers start changing the design is commonplace even in smaller orgs. If you hire a competent designer to build an accessible and attractive application, just let them do their job! If you want design by committee instead then just fire the designer and get on with it.
  - numpty13 6y ago
    As a designer, feedback from a good "goddamn copy writer" is invaluable. If they can't succinctly describe the thing I've designed to somebody who doesn't already know how to use it, or they can't fit what they need to say into the spaces I've left for them, it's often a sign that I haven't designed it very well.
- danjac 6y ago
  They might hire the best developers and designers, but the internal politics get in the way of them doing their jobs. UI in particular is prone to antipatterns such as bikeshedding and highest paid person in the room having the final say.
- pembrook 6y ago
  This is absolutely true. However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies. If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt. If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing. It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands. You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.
  - bzzzt 6y ago
    Maybe you shouldn't focus on getting 'the best person' on the correct place, but try to make 'the best process' for evaluating and improving UI/UX and mandate it's followed everywhere. One of the projects at my workplace decided to document every design decision from all viewpoints including the final decision made. Seemed to help a lot against people arguing in circles and/or bikeshedding.
    - blowski 6y ago
      And that way lies large corporate Agile. All work becomes crap, because you can no longer tell the difference between good people encumbered by bureacracy and crap people using the bureaucracy as an excuse. My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        Process works though, because not everyone on your team is going to be an "A" student, and if you have 500 employees, you simply don't have the time and bandwidth to make a custom process for each person. There's wide ranges of ability at every company, even prestigious FAANGs and investment banks and pretty much everywhere. The great benefit of layering on heavy process and bureaucracy is that you can get homogenized, reliable, reasonable-quality, but not consistently outstanding, output from the A, B, C, and D players, without terrible risk that someone who doesn't know what they are doing (who every company has) fucks everything up. As the saying goes, every process you encounter is scar tissue from a past fuck-up. What you sacrifice with all this bureaucracy is the absolutely brilliant output you could be getting from the A players, but the cost is usually worth mitigating the risk of disaster.
- nipponese 6y ago
  And the good designer has to be matched with the good pm.
- travisgriggs 6y ago
  There are indeed only so many good designers. There are exactly zero good product/project managers out there. There are some really nice and good and capable and kind and talented people who have this label attached to them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are some good product/project directors. There are some good product/project evangelists. But no good product/project manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and productivity and delivering the right product to the right people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the years, in every case, they've become less likable people because of it and we're no longer a net positive collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy and felt less about themselves over time. Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of this "position" remains at zero good ones.
  - anaerobicover 6y ago
    Your assertion is hard to engage without knowing the distinctions you identify between "manager", "clerk", "director", and "evangelist", and what it would mean for a so-called manager to be "just masquerading as some other responsibility".
  - duckmysick 6y ago
    > Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager [...], but I stand by my assertion. What would it take to change your mind?
  - hellohello1 6y ago
    This attitude is why I insist on having my developers manage at least one small project before moving to a senior role.
- ska 6y ago
  This is a cop out, I think. Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work. What you're describing is an extraordinary team composed of regular individuals.
    - ska 6y ago
      Sure, but the limiting factor isn’t access to extraordinary people; hence the cop out.
CivBase 6y ago
> As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically. This is extremely true in my experience, but how can you fight against this as an organization scales? Just simplify the org structure and define strict definitions for what each level is responsible for?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Very small teams with a very specific area of responsibility. The moment you get whole departments involved you’ve already lost.
  - anaerobicover 6y ago
    But then inevitably you have either overlap or conflict between these small teams, because one of them needs something that's within the other's responsibility. Larger structures necessarily form.
userbinator 6y ago
This is what the phrase "design by committee" summarises succinctly.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
waheoo 6y ago
I'm a distributed systems engineer with 20 years exp currently replacing a ten year old feature with something that looks exactly the same. Why is a dev earning 200k/year working on CSS and JS something a grad on 60k/year could easily do? Who knows. This industry is fucked.
everdrive 6y ago
At a high, conceptual level this is the sort of error people make all the time: 1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation. 2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about this complex situation. 3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions. This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things. It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about "personalities."
- parrellel 6y ago
  Organizations can be very consistent in their behavior as a part of their internal organization and culture. Treating a corporation as a Chinese Room is a useful abstraction.
- CptFribble 6y ago
  I think it's less of a moral narrative, and more to do with the way our brains process information - at a physical and organizational level, the human brain is like a series of stacked filters, cutting extraneous (or what our brain thinks is extraneous) information down to a size that can be interpreted by the higher cognitive functions within some acceptable limit of stress. The exact boundaries of what and how much information constitutes stress is different for everyone, itself produced by a learning process. Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains. The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person). IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group. This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both. The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.
myth2018 6y ago
In automotive, aircraft and many other industries, it's commonplace for them to manage multiple concerns and balance them more or less at the same level of importance. Comfort, internal space, manufacturability, safety, and so many other aspects are carefully taken in consideration during the design phase. Trade-offs are constantly made in order to reach a balanced design. And that, for some reasons I can only speculate about, doesn't seem to be happening in the software industry. For quite a long time, technologies advance way faster than our ability to fully understand their possibilities and implications. I believe it explains, partially at least, our current struggles.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Humans suck at dealing with complexity. Companies are semi-arbitrary globs of humans. Even an extremely small company has enough complexity that one person may not understand it all or make mistakes dealing with it. The bigger question is, how does any company get anything done at all?
EGreg 6y ago
How much of that can be attributed not to company policies but to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ? The only way for bad interface to ship is for good designers to do nothing!
munificent 6y ago
> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that. If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on. For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute. We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.
- edbob 6y ago
  > Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that. I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.
  - sosborn 6y ago
    The real problem is that small companies assume that Google must know what’s it’s doing and that even though google is trying to solve different problems, the only right thing to do is try to copy them.
- 6y ago
jokethrowaway 6y ago
More in general, they're so big they won't fail, there is not much pressure on making the right choice but in showing someone we thought about things. Also, the bigger the company the duller the job. After a while you just implement the damn button and stop caring or looking for improvements.
friendzis 6y ago
> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? When you have N IT specialists with years of intimate experience with a certain design paradigm designing stuff, it becomes extremely difficult to even consider outsider perspective. How many working on laptops have touchpads that never ever upon release move the pointer slightly? Close to zero. Mouse people may not even know of this issue.

dimitrios1 6y ago

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.

throwaway316943 6y ago
I think the mean arrives a lot sooner than that. The situation where PMs and managers and goddamn copy writers start changing the design is commonplace even in smaller orgs. If you hire a competent designer to build an accessible and attractive application, just let them do their job! If you want design by committee instead then just fire the designer and get on with it.
- numpty13 6y ago
  As a designer, feedback from a good "goddamn copy writer" is invaluable. If they can't succinctly describe the thing I've designed to somebody who doesn't already know how to use it, or they can't fit what they need to say into the spaces I've left for them, it's often a sign that I haven't designed it very well.
danjac 6y ago
They might hire the best developers and designers, but the internal politics get in the way of them doing their jobs. UI in particular is prone to antipatterns such as bikeshedding and highest paid person in the room having the final say.
pembrook 6y ago
This is absolutely true. However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies. If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt. If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing. It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands. You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.
- bzzzt 6y ago
  Maybe you shouldn't focus on getting 'the best person' on the correct place, but try to make 'the best process' for evaluating and improving UI/UX and mandate it's followed everywhere. One of the projects at my workplace decided to document every design decision from all viewpoints including the final decision made. Seemed to help a lot against people arguing in circles and/or bikeshedding.
  - blowski 6y ago
    And that way lies large corporate Agile. All work becomes crap, because you can no longer tell the difference between good people encumbered by bureacracy and crap people using the bureaucracy as an excuse. My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      Process works though, because not everyone on your team is going to be an "A" student, and if you have 500 employees, you simply don't have the time and bandwidth to make a custom process for each person. There's wide ranges of ability at every company, even prestigious FAANGs and investment banks and pretty much everywhere. The great benefit of layering on heavy process and bureaucracy is that you can get homogenized, reliable, reasonable-quality, but not consistently outstanding, output from the A, B, C, and D players, without terrible risk that someone who doesn't know what they are doing (who every company has) fucks everything up. As the saying goes, every process you encounter is scar tissue from a past fuck-up. What you sacrifice with all this bureaucracy is the absolutely brilliant output you could be getting from the A players, but the cost is usually worth mitigating the risk of disaster.
nipponese 6y ago
And the good designer has to be matched with the good pm.
travisgriggs 6y ago
There are indeed only so many good designers. There are exactly zero good product/project managers out there. There are some really nice and good and capable and kind and talented people who have this label attached to them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are some good product/project directors. There are some good product/project evangelists. But no good product/project manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and productivity and delivering the right product to the right people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the years, in every case, they've become less likable people because of it and we're no longer a net positive collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy and felt less about themselves over time. Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of this "position" remains at zero good ones.
- anaerobicover 6y ago
  Your assertion is hard to engage without knowing the distinctions you identify between "manager", "clerk", "director", and "evangelist", and what it would mean for a so-called manager to be "just masquerading as some other responsibility".
- duckmysick 6y ago
  > Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager [...], but I stand by my assertion. What would it take to change your mind?
- hellohello1 6y ago
  This attitude is why I insist on having my developers manage at least one small project before moving to a senior role.
ska 6y ago
This is a cop out, I think. Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work. What you're describing is an extraordinary team composed of regular individuals.
  - ska 6y ago
    Sure, but the limiting factor isn’t access to extraordinary people; hence the cop out.

CivBase 6y ago

> As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically. This is extremely true in my experience, but how can you fight against this as an organization scales? Just simplify the org structure and define strict definitions for what each level is responsible for?

Aeolun 6y ago
Very small teams with a very specific area of responsibility. The moment you get whole departments involved you’ve already lost.
- anaerobicover 6y ago
  But then inevitably you have either overlap or conflict between these small teams, because one of them needs something that's within the other's responsibility. Larger structures necessarily form.

userbinator 6y ago

This is what the phrase "design by committee" summarises succinctly.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

waheoo 6y ago

I'm a distributed systems engineer with 20 years exp currently replacing a ten year old feature with something that looks exactly the same. Why is a dev earning 200k/year working on CSS and JS something a grad on 60k/year could easily do? Who knows. This industry is fucked.

everdrive 6y ago

At a high, conceptual level this is the sort of error people make all the time: 1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation. 2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about this complex situation. 3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions. This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things. It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about "personalities."

parrellel 6y ago
Organizations can be very consistent in their behavior as a part of their internal organization and culture. Treating a corporation as a Chinese Room is a useful abstraction.
CptFribble 6y ago
I think it's less of a moral narrative, and more to do with the way our brains process information - at a physical and organizational level, the human brain is like a series of stacked filters, cutting extraneous (or what our brain thinks is extraneous) information down to a size that can be interpreted by the higher cognitive functions within some acceptable limit of stress. The exact boundaries of what and how much information constitutes stress is different for everyone, itself produced by a learning process. Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains. The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).
- webmaven 6y ago
  > The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person). IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group. This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both. The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.

myth2018 6y ago

In automotive, aircraft and many other industries, it's commonplace for them to manage multiple concerns and balance them more or less at the same level of importance. Comfort, internal space, manufacturability, safety, and so many other aspects are carefully taken in consideration during the design phase. Trade-offs are constantly made in order to reach a balanced design. And that, for some reasons I can only speculate about, doesn't seem to be happening in the software industry. For quite a long time, technologies advance way faster than our ability to fully understand their possibilities and implications. I believe it explains, partially at least, our current struggles.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Humans suck at dealing with complexity. Companies are semi-arbitrary globs of humans. Even an extremely small company has enough complexity that one person may not understand it all or make mistakes dealing with it. The bigger question is, how does any company get anything done at all?

EGreg 6y ago

How much of that can be attributed not to company policies but to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ? The only way for bad interface to ship is for good designers to do nothing!

munificent 6y ago

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that. If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on. For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute. We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.

edbob 6y ago
> Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that. I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.
- sosborn 6y ago
  The real problem is that small companies assume that Google must know what’s it’s doing and that even though google is trying to solve different problems, the only right thing to do is try to copy them.
6y ago

jokethrowaway 6y ago

More in general, they're so big they won't fail, there is not much pressure on making the right choice but in showing someone we thought about things. Also, the bigger the company the duller the job. After a while you just implement the damn button and stop caring or looking for improvements.

friendzis 6y ago

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? When you have N IT specialists with years of intimate experience with a certain design paradigm designing stuff, it becomes extremely difficult to even consider outsider perspective. How many working on laptops have touchpads that never ever upon release move the pointer slightly? Close to zero. Mouse people may not even know of this issue.