17 ms·

Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind

255 points by mad_ned 5y ago

havermeyer 5y ago
I saw a lot of this when I worked at Google, both with internal-facing products and external-facing ones (software, though, not hardware). Organization A would build their own query engine, for example, but then organization B would build their own competing one because A's solution didn't quite work in the ways that they wanted it to. The result, of course, was that now you have a proliferation of query engines, and if you're a neutral party, you just end up being confused about which to pick since they all have tradeoffs, and none of them have sufficient headcount to build out more complete functionality. In terms of external products, there's a long line of competing chat, video calling, payment, etc. solutions, most of which have been killed off by now. My takeaway was that I wish leadership had thought more critically about how to invest resources across organizations to build fewer but more adaptable products, but I don't think the right incentives existed :/
- cle 5y ago
  IMO the alternative is not clearly better either. A certain amount of internal competition and diversity is healthy, but not too much nor too little. Putting “all your eggs in one basket” can also end in disaster, and the worst case is arguably worse.
- jsnell 5y ago
  Seems like there's a pretty big difference between two groups duplicating the work of a handful of engineers, like in your query engine example, and billion dollar programs like in the article. My personal favorite example of the former were workflow systems; somewhere around 2009 Google had like 15 different ones. But obviously the reason was that nobody had foreseen such a need early enough, a lot groups ended up building their own solutions, and with so much fragmentation none of them could reach critical mass organically. In terms of large scale and crippling internal competition, Nokia comes to mind with their utterly non-cooperating consumer vs. business mobile phone divisions back in the day.
  - quantum_state 5y ago
    It seems they have too many developers without better things to do ..
    - compiler-guy 5y ago
      I don’t think it is so much that they don’t have better things to do as it is that their primary project is blocked by some distant tool not quite doing what they need and unwilling or unable to make it do what they need. So the engineers roll their own. It works perfectly well for their narrow use case , but is also half-baked for the general case. Then a year later some distant team sees that you half baked solution would work for them if it were generalized a bit, but you don’t have the time or resources to help this distant team. So yet another half baked solution appears.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Well, then there's Hangouts which already had all the necessary features and Google killed it anyway. Which shows that Google is an internecine regressive management hierarchy like any other.
- closeparen 5y ago
  I’ve never been more motivated to quit than when on the other side of this. The thing that already exists only seems from a distance like it does what I need. It makes different trade offs, it’s poor quality, the team that owns it is far away, and they “agree in principle” with all my proposed changes but “it’s a question of resources.” On smaller projects I have sucked it up, and wow. Something special about tying yourself up in knots to do work you’re ashamed of in the end. On the bigger projects I’ve always managed to wriggle out, thank god. Usually by building something domain specific so as to avoid the appearance of direct competition. Language and branding are crucial here. If your design doc uses the words “rules engine” half the company perks up. Why aren’t you using ours? On the other hand “configuration” is totally fine.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    Would a data driven approach help reduce the number of interpretations of what the problem being solved actually is?
    - ganzuul 5y ago
      HN downvoters are truly inscrutable. What could possibly trigger malcontent in that topical, targeted question I just asked??
      - kop316 5y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I will offer, I read your GP several times and I still don't understand the question.
        ganzuul 5y ago
        Well thank you for informing me of that. I'm hopeful that if people were to look at the same data the teams would not have such vastly different ideas about what problem they are trying to solve. I presume that these organizations generate overlapping products because they don't communicate, but shared data is a kind of top-down communication which works even if the teams feel that they can not coordinate.
lmm 5y ago
The article thoroughly fails to prove its claim. They had two separate divisions working on competing projects, sure. Was that bad? Did that actually hurt them? The idea that they would have built something better if they'd been on friendlier terms, if they'd talked to each other more, seems to just be blindly assumed.
- bilekas 5y ago
  I hear you, but I don't think the article is that specific.. It's an internal article.. I happen to agree. Along the lines of Era, a greek, you could put stoicism in there. But writing about it wouldnt be stoic. Are you looking for a 'proof' of his claim ?
  - lmm 5y ago
    When the title is "Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind", I would expect some sort of support for the idea that internal competition is dangerous. I didn't find it. They had internal competition, their product failed, but there's only the vaguest handwave towards relating these two facts together.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  It gets even more interesting when you think that by definition, our economy is supposed to be a long term win by having completely separated companies building the same thing competitively. If its poor allocation for the company, why is it a good allocation method for our economy as a whole? If its a good allocation of resources for our economy, then what makes it bad for a company to do it internally?
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    Coordination and consensus can have non linear costs, and will vary with the amount complexity of the decisions that need to be made.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Competition in an economy works because the market picks the winners and allocates resources to them. Often that means several winners because different competitors have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Nobody knows their requirements and price tolerance better than the customer. Incentives of the producer and customer are aligned. Inside an organisation there’s no real mechanism equivalent to a market within which these alternatives can compete. It almost entirely comes down to politics, not relative cost, features and technical suitability. If a team’s solution is adopted by another department does their revenue go up? Do they get extra resources? How do they advertise their product? What’s their incentive to provide customer service and support? If they get a new project or strategic direction and this ‘product’ doesn’t fit their vision anymore what’s to stop them just dropping it? After all none of their budget actually comes from this ‘product’ no matter how many other teams use it. It’s not that these problems can’t be solved, but there’s no real market or real revenue stream there so market forces have to be consciously emulated by management fiat. If enough layers of management lose focus on that, or management changes, it all breaks down. It’s basically the same problem as with planned economies.
throwawaysea 5y ago
This was a great story and it reminds me once again that little in the world of business is new. I wanted to share some thoughts on this paragraph: > Today I find it ridiculous that a major corporation would allow huge groups to silo to this degree, to fail to communicate, cooperate, and share, and to allow them to build overlapping and competing products. To allow this kind of animosity to build between employees of the same company. We’re talking about thousands of engineers involved here, between the two divisions. Seems like something that could have only happened in the crazy 1980’s, but I am betting if enough people read this far, we will see comments to the contrary. This happens very regularly and it is to the detriment of both the company and employees. I'll take the tech giants as an example, although this probably applies to other enormous organizations as well. Google displays this internal competition in one way, with a scattered, inconsistent, and ever-changing strategy for products like Chat that many on HN have joked is caused by promotion-driven engineering and cut-throat focus on personal gain. Amazon allows multiple teams to go after the same opportunities, with the mentality that it is better to have two horses in the race. Microsoft had inter-org competitive dynamics throughout the 2000s that was captured in the famous organizational chart of tech companies (https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6) - although that culture may have changed under Satya Nadella's leadership. Large companies are less like small businesses and more like small countries or governments. So naturally, politics arises - but companies are new to it and do a bad job of dealing with political dynamics. So when they allow internal competition, they don't even manage to create a "fair" playing field. More typically, there might one team that is chosen to be the "survivor" by an arbitrary executive decision, or there might be a part of the company with more resources that out-paces the others, or the company may just make effectively random choices, or whatever else. This can leave talented teams and employees jaded, frustrated, and burned out. It can also create immense distrust that those affected carry forward with them into subsequent jobs or their personal life. As for the products and the company - the best ideas don't necessarily survive this, and the loss of talent eventually accumulates towards the fall of a big company from its peaks.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  I worked at a shop with a psycho-in-chief who thought he was Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Internal competitions were one of his favorite things, but he generally had a pre-ordained winner. In one example we had two teams asked to deliver the same calculation enginer: - Team A: 1 dev, ~1000 lines of code, ~ 3 months but in a tech he personally hated vs - Team B: 15 dev, project manager, 100k lines of code, 18 months.. and they stole someone from Team A to basically explain the business logic to them Team Bs solution was also on delivery 10x slower. Team B won. A year later once he was gone, it was all scrapped and given back to Team A.
bilekas 5y ago
As much as I feel this write up is a self reflection, its useful. I appreciate the time you took to talk it out. You expressed yourself really well.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Corporations are knife-fights over funding. What SHOULD happen in DEC was your two platforms competing to deliver a better product, and if they crossed into each other's sales turf, whatever. But of course such things never happen, Middle Management Machiavellis fight for their personal empires and it falls apart. I personally think large corps that acquire a bunch of separate Datacenter groups shouldn't consolidate them, instead they should set them up for internal competition to serve groups. Well, and AWS, although that is probably a losing battle. But again at the upper management levels, they can't tell who is doing well, so it goes the way of politics. The free market... eventually, delivers the death blows.
- toast0 5y ago
  I think the key thing is to encourage communication and cooperation between internal competitors, even if they're competing. Maybe datacenter groups A and B have very different ideas about how to run their network, but they probably both need good SFP+ tranceivers and could pool orders or diagnostics or lists of parts to avoid. They might not want to run as a single AS, but maybe they can share peering contacts or stats, and sometimes pass traffic for each other to tricky networks. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to consolidate, and if it comes from both sides of the consolidation, then it's more likely to work well. There's some danger of confusing customers if the competing teams are customer facing, so that needs to be handled with care, but it's doable.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    The incentives come as a package. If you motivate them to compete, it incentivizes them to not help the other team regarding "good SFP+ tranceivers and could pool orders or diagnostics or lists of parts to avoid" and perhaps even sabotage them as long as it doesn't look like sabotage.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    The notion of cooperative competition seems impossible on the face of things. Perhaps an extremely detail-oriented upper management or structure that exists above or outside the budgetary turfs of both entities could do that, but to do that properly would impose an extensive meeting overhead on both organizations to maintain comms with this other group or the upper management. And then any action taken on that would feel like a sword falling at any moment on groups, often disbanding them or redirecting them in what feels like an unfair and politically motivated moment. Remember that people in corporations gain some degree of emotional investment in what they are working on simply due to the economic reasons that they are getting paid to do that, and getting paid is survival, especially in the layoff-happy no-universal-healthcare no-social-safety-net American economy. You work or your life falls apart. So when I say knife fight, of course it isn't literal knives, but the motivations and survival instincts are the same. People can feel like this is life and death. Probably why back in the day places like DEC and IBM didn't fire people. You can alleviate some of the life-and-death paranoia underscoring budgetary knife fights with the knowledge that you won't be fired and you can work somewhere else in the company. Of course that doesn't really exist anymore.
ardit33 5y ago
I totally agree... a large part of Rome's decline was the intensity of 3rd century crises, and the civil wars that happen at that century between factions/self named emperors vying for power. This happens in any large organization to a degree...
- elevenoh 5y ago
  This is like the growing USA/West vs. China narrative that's making its way into the news narrative. Perhaps americans will increasingly direct their competitiveness & combativeness outwardly > inwardly. You can't change human nature much, but you can change what it's applied to.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
One of my favorite books is Slack, and I have this quote highlighted: "There is no such thing as healthy competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive." One anecdote I faced once was talking to a senior engineer at a FAANG company who was complaining that he just discovered another organization building the identical product his team had spent over a year on, saying that management was so disorganized it must have not realized it. A couple weeks later I happened to talk to a VP up his chain of command, and mentioned this to him, and he chuckled and said "oh yeah that's by design, I'd rather have internal competition than external, it's worth the cost". Was a good reminder for me to avoid large companies.
- lainga 5y ago
  That was also the policy of the Third Reich at multiple levels. Give overlapping tasks to competing organisations. Let the strongest win
  - kqr 5y ago
    Wasn't this also (primarily?) a way to prevent disloyalty to the Führer, by making it seem impossible to form alliances at lower levels?
    - somedude895 5y ago
      Yes, that's exactly what it was. Keep them squibbling among each other so they wouldn't get any ideas of disposing of him. At least that's the consensus nowadays. Not sure if there's any proof of his intent.
  - wildmanx 5y ago
    It's been reported that it's the Trump management style as well. Both in business as well as among his kids as well as the WH. (Not drawing other parallels to nazis here, please don't accuse me of that.)
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I suppose from the perspective of those higher up the chain of command, it’s not much different than acquiring competing companies as soon as possible.
sjg007 5y ago
This is one reason startups can win.
josh_today 5y ago
The first 7 paragraphs start with I/me/our. For some reason these types of articles stand out and are unreadable
- josh_today 5y ago
  Downvoted for pointing out an observation?
salesynerd 5y ago
Any competition, by its very nature, competes with the idea of cooperation. One, after all, competes to win. The perennial challenge is how to develop and maintain a healthy internal competition environment, especially when there are high monetary and non-monetary stakes involved. I don't think this issue has been resolved or that it's unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. One thing that I generally believe to be true is that internal competition is better than no competition. If a company doesn't have internal competition, it may be prone to group think. It is also highly likely that it will face an existential threat from external players who are not an thinking alike.
aserafini 5y ago
Internal competition can be ok if the cost is low. For example, having multiple ‘two pizza’ teams working on the same problem domain can reduce risk and help explore the solution space more quickly - multiple paths can be explored in parallel. Knowledge can be shared or teams merged when at least one approach is found to be successful. The problem in the article was that the competing silos were very large and expensive. And it sounds like a tribal atmosphere, where the effort of the competing silo was derided. That seems orthogonal to competition: competition can be friendly with the right framing from management.
kqr 5y ago
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Deming yet. This was one of the things he contested very strongly, along with - individual rankings and bonuses, - barriers between teams, - fear as a motivator, - empty goals and slogans without processes to support them, and - perhaps worst of all, short-termism and lack of continuity. There's much more in his books, which really did change (I want to say improved) my understanding of how good work happens.
- quag 5y ago
  Can you recommend a particular book of Deming’s to start with?
  - kqr 5y ago
    I really wish I could, but unfortunately I read it all back-to-back, along with related material from Shewhart and authors writing about Deming's writing, and it all kind of blends together in my head. I do plan on re-reading Out of the Crisis to begin with, though, so maybe there's some (good? bad?) subconscious reason I want to start with that.
  - stonecharioteer 5y ago
    Start with Out of the Crisis. There are a few videos on YouTube as well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gameshot911 5y ago
  Can you summarize at a high level, specifically, his philosophy against individual rankings/bonuses? If I, a hypothetical high achiever, knew that my average co-worker was to receive the same bonus as me, sure I may be more collaborative and work towards the overall success of the team, but I personally sure would be demotivated to work as hard as I may have otherwise.
  - kqr 5y ago
cgriswald 5y ago
My friend and I were world-competitive at Daytona USA, a SEGA racing game. We were a team whenever anyone else would race against us. Otherwise, we were extremely competitive against each other. However, when we would be done with a racing session, we would deconstruct and disclose our racing with each other. If one of us discovered a new technique for, say, dealing with a particular corner, we shared it with the other. (We also occasionally shared with a broader group, who repaid the favor.) It's not competition that is the problem. It's score-keeping and secrets. Our competition against each other allowed us to have fun and push ourselves to the point where we took our skills as far as was possible. A key component of this is that we gave credit where credit was due. My friend didn't get credit for beating me, but for sharing with me the secret of my defeat; and vice versa. Once again on equal footing, we credited each other not with knowledge, but with the skill to apply the knowledge. That experience has guided me in my life. Sure, in an unhealthy organization people can take advantage and not get back. But healthy competition has paid off more than it's cost me, and I've always thought life was too short to be in any unhealthy relationship, even with employers or coworkers.
- ElViajero 5y ago
  > If one of us discovered a new technique for, say, dealing with a particular corner, we shared it with the other. What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friends. If you do not get that incentives, if your department success means less budged for mine, if my colleague success puts my job at risk, if your project success creates a problem for mine, I will not be motivated to collaborate. If you create that incentive of collaboration then the "challenge" factor will be there. I have worked in great teams where we were evaluated as a company, where bonuses were for everybody or no-one. And it was a very competitive environment, I wanted to be as good as any colleague, know as much as they did. And, I wanted them to succeed because it was awesome to see such great projects but also because it was good for myself. I have not found any healthy company were competition was enforced top-down. Only when collaboration is designed and encouraged top-down then healthy sportsmanship arise from great engineers and teams.
  - 5y ago
ganzuul 5y ago
Relevant article about Sears: https://evonomics.com/the-ceo-of-sears-jon-haidt/ https://evonomics.com/the-ceo-of-sears-jon-haidt/ There is a popular narrative being reproduced that Walmart is a bigger planned economy than the Soviet Union ever was, and that they tried an internal market and that it was a disaster. Meanwhile the narrative says Sears was run into the ground by over-zealous capitalist idealism and blind fate in the free market. Don't shoot the messenger!!
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > There is a popular narrative being reproduced that Walmart is a bigger planned economy than the Soviet Union ever was, and that they tried an internal market and that it was a disaster Honestly, this misses the point entirely. Both planned economies and unplanned economies have organizations doing the producing and these organizations are obviously planned internally. But in a free market economy there is competition, so when these bureaucracies (inevitably) become sclerotic or dysfunctional, they are driven out of the market by new competitors, and so competition is what keeps things efficient. Whereas in planned economies there is no competition. If you want a car, you go to the state auto company. And when that bureaucracy becomes sclerotic, you can't defect and launch your own competitor. Nor can the state motorcycle company decide it wants to pivot into autos and drive the state auto company into the ground by offering a better product at a lower cost. There is simply no competition and thus no alternative for consumers. Therefore you see this typical pattern in planned economies where there is an initial boom and things even look really good but over a generation all these bureacracies become dysfunctional and require more and more inputs to produce a single output, at which point you start seeing chronic shortages and terrible quality problems. Arguing that the actual bureaucracy doing the production is "planned" and thus there is no difference between an economy based on competition and a planned economy with no competition is not to understand why one of these is superior than the other. It does not matter how big Amazon is, what matters is that there is competition to Amazon and that Amazon can be driven out of business once is starts to become massively inefficient.
  - kqr 5y ago
    This is a simplified view of the differences, to the point of maybe being oversimplified. (But you probably know that already.) Something "free markets" provide over planned economies is free(er) flow of information. Markets/economies are often incredibly complex. Allowing individual actors to signal information through pricing and competition, and allowing risk takers to exploit differences in these opinions of people to profit and simultaneously even out the differences in the direction that best corresponds to reality builds a system where it's much more likely the right things are done by the right people for the right reasons. It's just too complex to plan for. And besides, without the free markets there to give you feedback, you won't know what it is you're planning for. A (socially fair) free market is also a proper scoring rule for forecasts. It rewards people who are good at seeing into the future, and punishes those who are bad at it, in proportion to the costs of their errors. (This goes back to de Finetti's operational definition of probability.) Note that this is rather abstractly, in some sort of perfect microcosm. In practise, all free markets are distorted by privileged rent-seeking and other inefficiencies. I fully understand anyone who would be offended when I say that a free market punishes people who are bad at seeing into the future (hell, just reading that offends me!) because in reality, it also punishes all sorts of people, and often people who are great forecasters are precluded from exploiting their abilities in the free market, and so on and so forth. Please read my message not as social commentary or political bias, but the mathematical/cybernetic principles underlying this stuff, if executed well. And obviously, this doesn't even begin to explain the Sears/Walmart story, so I suspect there are other factors underlying that, too.
com2kid 5y ago
> There were no layoffs, no reassignments to different groups, they just let everything float for pretty much the summer. It must have cost a fortune, and I highly doubt anything would go down like this ever again in today’s tech business world. This has happened to me before at Microsoft. Eventually people were given the 90 day "find a new internal position or you'll be let go" but IIRC it was a good 2 months or so of doing nothing before that kicked in. And yes, it was really surreal.
- crocal 5y ago
  It’s very common. Top management in large political orgs do not want to be associated with a failed project. They will spend the first days actively covering their tracks. Once this is done, they usually send HR to clean house. Unions stay low too because on the paper this good for the employees (salary is there, more time is given to pivot, etc).
- wazoox 5y ago
  It can happen at smaller scale in small companies, too. In my first serious job, when the CEO left after a merge his assistant/secretary was left behind but with nothing to do, and was forgotten. At some point someone realised that she had spent several months doing nothing but playing solitaire on her PC. She didn't complain because she was afraid to simply be fired, obviously.
isuckatcoding 5y ago
> There were no layoffs, no reassignments to different groups, they just let everything float for pretty much the summer. It must have cost a fortune, and I highly doubt anything would go down like this ever again in today’s tech business world. Oh lol I’m kind of experiencing this right now. I think it’s more common than you might think.
vishnugupta 5y ago
Coincidentally I re-watched The Looming Tower[1] yesterday night. While it may have dramatised the rift between CIA and FBI based on what I have read it was quite vicious at that time. Another great example is how Apple beat Sony to iPod. Sony had key pieces in place -- terrific content and an iconic portable music device (Walkman). Yet the company's DNA and culture meant they wouldn't talk to each other (for whatever reason) to integrate them both to launch the next generation portal music device. Some VP may have felt awesome at winning a turf war but look what happened at a bigger game. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looming_Tower_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looming_Tower_(miniseries)
tester34 5y ago
title reminds me "Microsoft stack ranking" “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review.” “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
baby 5y ago
Competition between employees can be really bad as well. In general you want to be working in a non-judgmental environment where people are not afraid to ask questions, share their ignorance, and teach others what they need to know. If you often find yourself not daring to ask questions, or display your ignorance, maybe you should think about moving on.
- kevstev 5y ago
  I worked at an Investment Bank that did stack ranking and I worked with very smart people. So smart they figured out that helping out new guys on the team did absolutely nothing for them- any time spent not working on their specific OKRs was just detrimental to them. There was no incentive to help new guys on the team, and they were happy to just let them sink or swim. I couldn't stand to see that, so I would help mentor the new guys, and it often did cost me a lot of time and affected my deliverables. The joke was on us though- everyone was fighting for a bonus pool that largely didn't exist (this was in the aftermath of the financial crisis). Your only way "up" was to get out.
isolli 5y ago
It reminds me of the Sears disaster [0]. "Eddie Lampert broke the company into 30 plus autonomous businesses, each with its own president, chief marketing officer, board, and separately measured profit and loss. His idea was to harness the power of the free market, and to produce better and deeper data than anyone else. But the radical restructuring went horribly wrong, as divisions engaged in cutthroat competition against each other" [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/eddie-lamperts-sears-strategy-disaster-2013-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/eddie-lamperts-sears-strateg...
pjmlp 5y ago
Some modern examples, Windows Longhorn, Midori, WinRT (usually the usual "WinDev vs DevTools" has something to do with projects going down) WinUI vs Blazor vs MAUI vs Forms vs WPF ChromeOS vs Android vs Fuchsia PWA vs Jetpack Composer vs Flutter
theshadowknows 5y ago
At my previous job I didn't experience the internal conflict thing as much, we were lucky in that regard. But I did experience the "doing nothing for a while" thing. Within a couple of weeks my boss and his boss both left the company and it took forever to find replacements. Our team finished up our work that original boss had assigned and then...we were told to just keep doing what we were doing...which for the most part was playing call of duty on our company machines all day... At my current job there is a ton of internal competition and near constant reorganization. This very week my team was rolled into a new organization, and we're working as hard as we can to out position another team so that we don't get rolled under them (or replaced by them). We've positioned architects strategically and work well outside the chain of command to socialize our roadmaps and designs. We every so slightly bend policy where we can. Anything to gain an edge on "the competition" (who are vastly more well funded but who service a considerably smaller section of the enterprise). It's extremely stressful and not productive and absolutely not why I joined this company two years ago. So I'm interviewing at our actual competition. I've spoken with their HR and the person I'll report to already (if I get an offer). Next week I have three more panels and then hopefully I'll know something soon. If it works out I'm going to knowledge dump to my team, tell them to update their linkedin and GitHub, and then I'm going to burn off my PTO and drop my two weeks.
- tacticalDonut 5y ago
  This reminds me of Microsoft's culture. Especially with all the reorgs. Good luck with your (hopefully) next job!
varispeed 5y ago
The "I am better than you" culture in an organisation is funny. In the end both of them get paid below what they should be paid and they don't even own any stake in the organisation. However, turning people against each other in an organisation, blinds them to the fact they are being exploited. How else can you explain that you can't even afford a deposit to buy a house and at the same time the organisation is boasting about another billion of profits? Tech people should get together and unionise, as they are the modern slaves.
cletus 5y ago
In my experience, internal competition in a sufficiently large organization is inevitable. This may be a hot take but I think it can be healthy. Also trying to eliminate internal competition can often be worse than internal competition. Why? Because management ends up anointing a "winner" when there are competing proposals before anyone has built anything. This rewards people who are good at getting projects approved rather than execution. And I've seen so many bad projects, late projects and projects that fail that come out of a process like this. More often than not, those who started the project have long since claimed credit and moved on to other projects or companies so any failures get blamed on execution. Additionally, the process of anointing a winner takes time and resources you don't necessarily have. Those decisions are typically based on factors that don't matter or wrong assumptions you'll only find out when the rubber hits the road. Look at iOS and MacOS. A certain breed of manager would've decided this internal competition was "bad" and would've spent a year figuring out which one to invest in because "two OSs are bad". Rather than getting paralyzed with indecision, it's nearly always better to ship earlier and figure out what to do later. Look no further than Windows to see why. Steve Ballmer, who came up as the business head of Windows, saw everything through the lens of Windows everywhere. So when smartphones became a thing, what did he do? Adapt the Windows OS to phones of course. Microsoft lost time to market and Windows Phone went nowhere. Years earlier Microsoft bought the then popular Sidekick and rather than rolling with it they spent years figuring out how to move it to Windows. This can of course go wrong. Anything can. But in a sufficiently large organization your attitude should be how to handle internal competition not how do you eliminate it. The latter is a fool's errand.

255 points by mad_ned 5y ago

I saw a lot of this when I worked at Google, both with internal-facing products and external-facing ones (software, though, not hardware). Organization A would build their own query engine, for example, but then organization B would build their own competing one because A's solution didn't quite work in the ways that they wanted it to. The result, of course, was that now you have a proliferation of query engines, and if you're a neutral party, you just end up being confused about which to pick since they all have tradeoffs, and none of them have sufficient headcount to build out more complete functionality. In terms of external products, there's a long line of competing chat, video calling, payment, etc. solutions, most of which have been killed off by now. My takeaway was that I wish leadership had thought more critically about how to invest resources across organizations to build fewer but more adaptable products, but I don't think the right incentives existed :/

cle 5y ago
IMO the alternative is not clearly better either. A certain amount of internal competition and diversity is healthy, but not too much nor too little. Putting “all your eggs in one basket” can also end in disaster, and the worst case is arguably worse.
jsnell 5y ago
Seems like there's a pretty big difference between two groups duplicating the work of a handful of engineers, like in your query engine example, and billion dollar programs like in the article. My personal favorite example of the former were workflow systems; somewhere around 2009 Google had like 15 different ones. But obviously the reason was that nobody had foreseen such a need early enough, a lot groups ended up building their own solutions, and with so much fragmentation none of them could reach critical mass organically. In terms of large scale and crippling internal competition, Nokia comes to mind with their utterly non-cooperating consumer vs. business mobile phone divisions back in the day.
- quantum_state 5y ago
  It seems they have too many developers without better things to do ..
  - compiler-guy 5y ago
    I don’t think it is so much that they don’t have better things to do as it is that their primary project is blocked by some distant tool not quite doing what they need and unwilling or unable to make it do what they need. So the engineers roll their own. It works perfectly well for their narrow use case , but is also half-baked for the general case. Then a year later some distant team sees that you half baked solution would work for them if it were generalized a bit, but you don’t have the time or resources to help this distant team. So yet another half baked solution appears.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Well, then there's Hangouts which already had all the necessary features and Google killed it anyway. Which shows that Google is an internecine regressive management hierarchy like any other.
closeparen 5y ago
I’ve never been more motivated to quit than when on the other side of this. The thing that already exists only seems from a distance like it does what I need. It makes different trade offs, it’s poor quality, the team that owns it is far away, and they “agree in principle” with all my proposed changes but “it’s a question of resources.” On smaller projects I have sucked it up, and wow. Something special about tying yourself up in knots to do work you’re ashamed of in the end. On the bigger projects I’ve always managed to wriggle out, thank god. Usually by building something domain specific so as to avoid the appearance of direct competition. Language and branding are crucial here. If your design doc uses the words “rules engine” half the company perks up. Why aren’t you using ours? On the other hand “configuration” is totally fine.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Would a data driven approach help reduce the number of interpretations of what the problem being solved actually is?
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    HN downvoters are truly inscrutable. What could possibly trigger malcontent in that topical, targeted question I just asked??
    - kop316 5y ago
      I didn't downvote you, but I will offer, I read your GP several times and I still don't understand the question.
      - ganzuul 5y ago
        Well thank you for informing me of that. I'm hopeful that if people were to look at the same data the teams would not have such vastly different ideas about what problem they are trying to solve. I presume that these organizations generate overlapping products because they don't communicate, but shared data is a kind of top-down communication which works even if the teams feel that they can not coordinate.

lmm 5y ago

The article thoroughly fails to prove its claim. They had two separate divisions working on competing projects, sure. Was that bad? Did that actually hurt them? The idea that they would have built something better if they'd been on friendlier terms, if they'd talked to each other more, seems to just be blindly assumed.

bilekas 5y ago
I hear you, but I don't think the article is that specific.. It's an internal article.. I happen to agree. Along the lines of Era, a greek, you could put stoicism in there. But writing about it wouldnt be stoic. Are you looking for a 'proof' of his claim ?
- lmm 5y ago
  When the title is "Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind", I would expect some sort of support for the idea that internal competition is dangerous. I didn't find it. They had internal competition, their product failed, but there's only the vaguest handwave towards relating these two facts together.
dv_dt 5y ago
It gets even more interesting when you think that by definition, our economy is supposed to be a long term win by having completely separated companies building the same thing competitively. If its poor allocation for the company, why is it a good allocation method for our economy as a whole? If its a good allocation of resources for our economy, then what makes it bad for a company to do it internally?
- cinquemb 5y ago
  Coordination and consensus can have non linear costs, and will vary with the amount complexity of the decisions that need to be made.
- simonh 5y ago
  Competition in an economy works because the market picks the winners and allocates resources to them. Often that means several winners because different competitors have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Nobody knows their requirements and price tolerance better than the customer. Incentives of the producer and customer are aligned. Inside an organisation there’s no real mechanism equivalent to a market within which these alternatives can compete. It almost entirely comes down to politics, not relative cost, features and technical suitability. If a team’s solution is adopted by another department does their revenue go up? Do they get extra resources? How do they advertise their product? What’s their incentive to provide customer service and support? If they get a new project or strategic direction and this ‘product’ doesn’t fit their vision anymore what’s to stop them just dropping it? After all none of their budget actually comes from this ‘product’ no matter how many other teams use it. It’s not that these problems can’t be solved, but there’s no real market or real revenue stream there so market forces have to be consciously emulated by management fiat. If enough layers of management lose focus on that, or management changes, it all breaks down. It’s basically the same problem as with planned economies.

throwawaysea 5y ago

This was a great story and it reminds me once again that little in the world of business is new. I wanted to share some thoughts on this paragraph: > Today I find it ridiculous that a major corporation would allow huge groups to silo to this degree, to fail to communicate, cooperate, and share, and to allow them to build overlapping and competing products. To allow this kind of animosity to build between employees of the same company. We’re talking about thousands of engineers involved here, between the two divisions. Seems like something that could have only happened in the crazy 1980’s, but I am betting if enough people read this far, we will see comments to the contrary. This happens very regularly and it is to the detriment of both the company and employees. I'll take the tech giants as an example, although this probably applies to other enormous organizations as well. Google displays this internal competition in one way, with a scattered, inconsistent, and ever-changing strategy for products like Chat that many on HN have joked is caused by promotion-driven engineering and cut-throat focus on personal gain. Amazon allows multiple teams to go after the same opportunities, with the mentality that it is better to have two horses in the race. Microsoft had inter-org competitive dynamics throughout the 2000s that was captured in the famous organizational chart of tech companies (https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6) - although that culture may have changed under Satya Nadella's leadership. Large companies are less like small businesses and more like small countries or governments. So naturally, politics arises - but companies are new to it and do a bad job of dealing with political dynamics. So when they allow internal competition, they don't even manage to create a "fair" playing field. More typically, there might one team that is chosen to be the "survivor" by an arbitrary executive decision, or there might be a part of the company with more resources that out-paces the others, or the company may just make effectively random choices, or whatever else. This can leave talented teams and employees jaded, frustrated, and burned out. It can also create immense distrust that those affected carry forward with them into subsequent jobs or their personal life. As for the products and the company - the best ideas don't necessarily survive this, and the loss of talent eventually accumulates towards the fall of a big company from its peaks.

steveBK123 5y ago
I worked at a shop with a psycho-in-chief who thought he was Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Internal competitions were one of his favorite things, but he generally had a pre-ordained winner. In one example we had two teams asked to deliver the same calculation enginer: - Team A: 1 dev, ~1000 lines of code, ~ 3 months but in a tech he personally hated vs - Team B: 15 dev, project manager, 100k lines of code, 18 months.. and they stole someone from Team A to basically explain the business logic to them Team Bs solution was also on delivery 10x slower. Team B won. A year later once he was gone, it was all scrapped and given back to Team A.

bilekas 5y ago

As much as I feel this write up is a self reflection, its useful. I appreciate the time you took to talk it out. You expressed yourself really well.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Corporations are knife-fights over funding. What SHOULD happen in DEC was your two platforms competing to deliver a better product, and if they crossed into each other's sales turf, whatever. But of course such things never happen, Middle Management Machiavellis fight for their personal empires and it falls apart. I personally think large corps that acquire a bunch of separate Datacenter groups shouldn't consolidate them, instead they should set them up for internal competition to serve groups. Well, and AWS, although that is probably a losing battle. But again at the upper management levels, they can't tell who is doing well, so it goes the way of politics. The free market... eventually, delivers the death blows.

toast0 5y ago
I think the key thing is to encourage communication and cooperation between internal competitors, even if they're competing. Maybe datacenter groups A and B have very different ideas about how to run their network, but they probably both need good SFP+ tranceivers and could pool orders or diagnostics or lists of parts to avoid. They might not want to run as a single AS, but maybe they can share peering contacts or stats, and sometimes pass traffic for each other to tricky networks. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to consolidate, and if it comes from both sides of the consolidation, then it's more likely to work well. There's some danger of confusing customers if the competing teams are customer facing, so that needs to be handled with care, but it's doable.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  The incentives come as a package. If you motivate them to compete, it incentivizes them to not help the other team regarding "good SFP+ tranceivers and could pool orders or diagnostics or lists of parts to avoid" and perhaps even sabotage them as long as it doesn't look like sabotage.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  The notion of cooperative competition seems impossible on the face of things. Perhaps an extremely detail-oriented upper management or structure that exists above or outside the budgetary turfs of both entities could do that, but to do that properly would impose an extensive meeting overhead on both organizations to maintain comms with this other group or the upper management. And then any action taken on that would feel like a sword falling at any moment on groups, often disbanding them or redirecting them in what feels like an unfair and politically motivated moment. Remember that people in corporations gain some degree of emotional investment in what they are working on simply due to the economic reasons that they are getting paid to do that, and getting paid is survival, especially in the layoff-happy no-universal-healthcare no-social-safety-net American economy. You work or your life falls apart. So when I say knife fight, of course it isn't literal knives, but the motivations and survival instincts are the same. People can feel like this is life and death. Probably why back in the day places like DEC and IBM didn't fire people. You can alleviate some of the life-and-death paranoia underscoring budgetary knife fights with the knowledge that you won't be fired and you can work somewhere else in the company. Of course that doesn't really exist anymore.

ardit33 5y ago

I totally agree... a large part of Rome's decline was the intensity of 3rd century crises, and the civil wars that happen at that century between factions/self named emperors vying for power. This happens in any large organization to a degree...

elevenoh 5y ago
This is like the growing USA/West vs. China narrative that's making its way into the news narrative. Perhaps americans will increasingly direct their competitiveness & combativeness outwardly > inwardly. You can't change human nature much, but you can change what it's applied to.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

One of my favorite books is Slack, and I have this quote highlighted: "There is no such thing as healthy competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive." One anecdote I faced once was talking to a senior engineer at a FAANG company who was complaining that he just discovered another organization building the identical product his team had spent over a year on, saying that management was so disorganized it must have not realized it. A couple weeks later I happened to talk to a VP up his chain of command, and mentioned this to him, and he chuckled and said "oh yeah that's by design, I'd rather have internal competition than external, it's worth the cost". Was a good reminder for me to avoid large companies.

lainga 5y ago
That was also the policy of the Third Reich at multiple levels. Give overlapping tasks to competing organisations. Let the strongest win
- kqr 5y ago
  Wasn't this also (primarily?) a way to prevent disloyalty to the Führer, by making it seem impossible to form alliances at lower levels?
  - somedude895 5y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what it was. Keep them squibbling among each other so they wouldn't get any ideas of disposing of him. At least that's the consensus nowadays. Not sure if there's any proof of his intent.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  It's been reported that it's the Trump management style as well. Both in business as well as among his kids as well as the WH. (Not drawing other parallels to nazis here, please don't accuse me of that.)
tshaddox 5y ago
I suppose from the perspective of those higher up the chain of command, it’s not much different than acquiring competing companies as soon as possible.

sjg007 5y ago

This is one reason startups can win.

josh_today 5y ago

The first 7 paragraphs start with I/me/our. For some reason these types of articles stand out and are unreadable

josh_today 5y ago
Downvoted for pointing out an observation?

salesynerd 5y ago

Any competition, by its very nature, competes with the idea of cooperation. One, after all, competes to win. The perennial challenge is how to develop and maintain a healthy internal competition environment, especially when there are high monetary and non-monetary stakes involved. I don't think this issue has been resolved or that it's unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. One thing that I generally believe to be true is that internal competition is better than no competition. If a company doesn't have internal competition, it may be prone to group think. It is also highly likely that it will face an existential threat from external players who are not an thinking alike.

aserafini 5y ago

Internal competition can be ok if the cost is low. For example, having multiple ‘two pizza’ teams working on the same problem domain can reduce risk and help explore the solution space more quickly - multiple paths can be explored in parallel. Knowledge can be shared or teams merged when at least one approach is found to be successful. The problem in the article was that the competing silos were very large and expensive. And it sounds like a tribal atmosphere, where the effort of the competing silo was derided. That seems orthogonal to competition: competition can be friendly with the right framing from management.

kqr 5y ago

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Deming yet. This was one of the things he contested very strongly, along with - individual rankings and bonuses, - barriers between teams, - fear as a motivator, - empty goals and slogans without processes to support them, and - perhaps worst of all, short-termism and lack of continuity. There's much more in his books, which really did change (I want to say improved) my understanding of how good work happens.

quag 5y ago
Can you recommend a particular book of Deming’s to start with?
- kqr 5y ago
  I really wish I could, but unfortunately I read it all back-to-back, along with related material from Shewhart and authors writing about Deming's writing, and it all kind of blends together in my head. I do plan on re-reading Out of the Crisis to begin with, though, so maybe there's some (good? bad?) subconscious reason I want to start with that.
- stonecharioteer 5y ago
  Start with Out of the Crisis. There are a few videos on YouTube as well.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gameshot911 5y ago
Can you summarize at a high level, specifically, his philosophy against individual rankings/bonuses? If I, a hypothetical high achiever, knew that my average co-worker was to receive the same bonus as me, sure I may be more collaborative and work towards the overall success of the team, but I personally sure would be demotivated to work as hard as I may have otherwise.
- kqr 5y ago

cgriswald 5y ago

My friend and I were world-competitive at Daytona USA, a SEGA racing game. We were a team whenever anyone else would race against us. Otherwise, we were extremely competitive against each other. However, when we would be done with a racing session, we would deconstruct and disclose our racing with each other. If one of us discovered a new technique for, say, dealing with a particular corner, we shared it with the other. (We also occasionally shared with a broader group, who repaid the favor.) It's not competition that is the problem. It's score-keeping and secrets. Our competition against each other allowed us to have fun and push ourselves to the point where we took our skills as far as was possible. A key component of this is that we gave credit where credit was due. My friend didn't get credit for beating me, but for sharing with me the secret of my defeat; and vice versa. Once again on equal footing, we credited each other not with knowledge, but with the skill to apply the knowledge. That experience has guided me in my life. Sure, in an unhealthy organization people can take advantage and not get back. But healthy competition has paid off more than it's cost me, and I've always thought life was too short to be in any unhealthy relationship, even with employers or coworkers.

ElViajero 5y ago
> If one of us discovered a new technique for, say, dealing with a particular corner, we shared it with the other. What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friends. If you do not get that incentives, if your department success means less budged for mine, if my colleague success puts my job at risk, if your project success creates a problem for mine, I will not be motivated to collaborate. If you create that incentive of collaboration then the "challenge" factor will be there. I have worked in great teams where we were evaluated as a company, where bonuses were for everybody or no-one. And it was a very competitive environment, I wanted to be as good as any colleague, know as much as they did. And, I wanted them to succeed because it was awesome to see such great projects but also because it was good for myself. I have not found any healthy company were competition was enforced top-down. Only when collaboration is designed and encouraged top-down then healthy sportsmanship arise from great engineers and teams.
- 5y ago

ganzuul 5y ago

Relevant article about Sears: https://evonomics.com/the-ceo-of-sears-jon-haidt/ https://evonomics.com/the-ceo-of-sears-jon-haidt/ There is a popular narrative being reproduced that Walmart is a bigger planned economy than the Soviet Union ever was, and that they tried an internal market and that it was a disaster. Meanwhile the narrative says Sears was run into the ground by over-zealous capitalist idealism and blind fate in the free market. Don't shoot the messenger!!

rsj_hn 5y ago
> There is a popular narrative being reproduced that Walmart is a bigger planned economy than the Soviet Union ever was, and that they tried an internal market and that it was a disaster Honestly, this misses the point entirely. Both planned economies and unplanned economies have organizations doing the producing and these organizations are obviously planned internally. But in a free market economy there is competition, so when these bureaucracies (inevitably) become sclerotic or dysfunctional, they are driven out of the market by new competitors, and so competition is what keeps things efficient. Whereas in planned economies there is no competition. If you want a car, you go to the state auto company. And when that bureaucracy becomes sclerotic, you can't defect and launch your own competitor. Nor can the state motorcycle company decide it wants to pivot into autos and drive the state auto company into the ground by offering a better product at a lower cost. There is simply no competition and thus no alternative for consumers. Therefore you see this typical pattern in planned economies where there is an initial boom and things even look really good but over a generation all these bureacracies become dysfunctional and require more and more inputs to produce a single output, at which point you start seeing chronic shortages and terrible quality problems. Arguing that the actual bureaucracy doing the production is "planned" and thus there is no difference between an economy based on competition and a planned economy with no competition is not to understand why one of these is superior than the other. It does not matter how big Amazon is, what matters is that there is competition to Amazon and that Amazon can be driven out of business once is starts to become massively inefficient.
- kqr 5y ago
  This is a simplified view of the differences, to the point of maybe being oversimplified. (But you probably know that already.) Something "free markets" provide over planned economies is free(er) flow of information. Markets/economies are often incredibly complex. Allowing individual actors to signal information through pricing and competition, and allowing risk takers to exploit differences in these opinions of people to profit and simultaneously even out the differences in the direction that best corresponds to reality builds a system where it's much more likely the right things are done by the right people for the right reasons. It's just too complex to plan for. And besides, without the free markets there to give you feedback, you won't know what it is you're planning for. A (socially fair) free market is also a proper scoring rule for forecasts. It rewards people who are good at seeing into the future, and punishes those who are bad at it, in proportion to the costs of their errors. (This goes back to de Finetti's operational definition of probability.) Note that this is rather abstractly, in some sort of perfect microcosm. In practise, all free markets are distorted by privileged rent-seeking and other inefficiencies. I fully understand anyone who would be offended when I say that a free market punishes people who are bad at seeing into the future (hell, just reading that offends me!) because in reality, it also punishes all sorts of people, and often people who are great forecasters are precluded from exploiting their abilities in the free market, and so on and so forth. Please read my message not as social commentary or political bias, but the mathematical/cybernetic principles underlying this stuff, if executed well. And obviously, this doesn't even begin to explain the Sears/Walmart story, so I suspect there are other factors underlying that, too.

com2kid 5y ago

> There were no layoffs, no reassignments to different groups, they just let everything float for pretty much the summer. It must have cost a fortune, and I highly doubt anything would go down like this ever again in today’s tech business world. This has happened to me before at Microsoft. Eventually people were given the 90 day "find a new internal position or you'll be let go" but IIRC it was a good 2 months or so of doing nothing before that kicked in. And yes, it was really surreal.

crocal 5y ago
It’s very common. Top management in large political orgs do not want to be associated with a failed project. They will spend the first days actively covering their tracks. Once this is done, they usually send HR to clean house. Unions stay low too because on the paper this good for the employees (salary is there, more time is given to pivot, etc).
wazoox 5y ago
It can happen at smaller scale in small companies, too. In my first serious job, when the CEO left after a merge his assistant/secretary was left behind but with nothing to do, and was forgotten. At some point someone realised that she had spent several months doing nothing but playing solitaire on her PC. She didn't complain because she was afraid to simply be fired, obviously.

isuckatcoding 5y ago

> There were no layoffs, no reassignments to different groups, they just let everything float for pretty much the summer. It must have cost a fortune, and I highly doubt anything would go down like this ever again in today’s tech business world. Oh lol I’m kind of experiencing this right now. I think it’s more common than you might think.

vishnugupta 5y ago

Coincidentally I re-watched The Looming Tower[1] yesterday night. While it may have dramatised the rift between CIA and FBI based on what I have read it was quite vicious at that time. Another great example is how Apple beat Sony to iPod. Sony had key pieces in place -- terrific content and an iconic portable music device (Walkman). Yet the company's DNA and culture meant they wouldn't talk to each other (for whatever reason) to integrate them both to launch the next generation portal music device. Some VP may have felt awesome at winning a turf war but look what happened at a bigger game. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looming_Tower_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looming_Tower_(miniseries)

tester34 5y ago

title reminds me "Microsoft stack ranking" “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review.” “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

baby 5y ago

Competition between employees can be really bad as well. In general you want to be working in a non-judgmental environment where people are not afraid to ask questions, share their ignorance, and teach others what they need to know. If you often find yourself not daring to ask questions, or display your ignorance, maybe you should think about moving on.

kevstev 5y ago
I worked at an Investment Bank that did stack ranking and I worked with very smart people. So smart they figured out that helping out new guys on the team did absolutely nothing for them- any time spent not working on their specific OKRs was just detrimental to them. There was no incentive to help new guys on the team, and they were happy to just let them sink or swim. I couldn't stand to see that, so I would help mentor the new guys, and it often did cost me a lot of time and affected my deliverables. The joke was on us though- everyone was fighting for a bonus pool that largely didn't exist (this was in the aftermath of the financial crisis). Your only way "up" was to get out.

isolli 5y ago

It reminds me of the Sears disaster [0]. "Eddie Lampert broke the company into 30 plus autonomous businesses, each with its own president, chief marketing officer, board, and separately measured profit and loss. His idea was to harness the power of the free market, and to produce better and deeper data than anyone else. But the radical restructuring went horribly wrong, as divisions engaged in cutthroat competition against each other" [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/eddie-lamperts-sears-strategy-disaster-2013-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/eddie-lamperts-sears-strateg...

pjmlp 5y ago

Some modern examples, Windows Longhorn, Midori, WinRT (usually the usual "WinDev vs DevTools" has something to do with projects going down) WinUI vs Blazor vs MAUI vs Forms vs WPF ChromeOS vs Android vs Fuchsia PWA vs Jetpack Composer vs Flutter

theshadowknows 5y ago

At my previous job I didn't experience the internal conflict thing as much, we were lucky in that regard. But I did experience the "doing nothing for a while" thing. Within a couple of weeks my boss and his boss both left the company and it took forever to find replacements. Our team finished up our work that original boss had assigned and then...we were told to just keep doing what we were doing...which for the most part was playing call of duty on our company machines all day... At my current job there is a ton of internal competition and near constant reorganization. This very week my team was rolled into a new organization, and we're working as hard as we can to out position another team so that we don't get rolled under them (or replaced by them). We've positioned architects strategically and work well outside the chain of command to socialize our roadmaps and designs. We every so slightly bend policy where we can. Anything to gain an edge on "the competition" (who are vastly more well funded but who service a considerably smaller section of the enterprise). It's extremely stressful and not productive and absolutely not why I joined this company two years ago. So I'm interviewing at our actual competition. I've spoken with their HR and the person I'll report to already (if I get an offer). Next week I have three more panels and then hopefully I'll know something soon. If it works out I'm going to knowledge dump to my team, tell them to update their linkedin and GitHub, and then I'm going to burn off my PTO and drop my two weeks.

tacticalDonut 5y ago
This reminds me of Microsoft's culture. Especially with all the reorgs. Good luck with your (hopefully) next job!

varispeed 5y ago

The "I am better than you" culture in an organisation is funny. In the end both of them get paid below what they should be paid and they don't even own any stake in the organisation. However, turning people against each other in an organisation, blinds them to the fact they are being exploited. How else can you explain that you can't even afford a deposit to buy a house and at the same time the organisation is boasting about another billion of profits? Tech people should get together and unionise, as they are the modern slaves.

cletus 5y ago

In my experience, internal competition in a sufficiently large organization is inevitable. This may be a hot take but I think it can be healthy. Also trying to eliminate internal competition can often be worse than internal competition. Why? Because management ends up anointing a "winner" when there are competing proposals before anyone has built anything. This rewards people who are good at getting projects approved rather than execution. And I've seen so many bad projects, late projects and projects that fail that come out of a process like this. More often than not, those who started the project have long since claimed credit and moved on to other projects or companies so any failures get blamed on execution. Additionally, the process of anointing a winner takes time and resources you don't necessarily have. Those decisions are typically based on factors that don't matter or wrong assumptions you'll only find out when the rubber hits the road. Look at iOS and MacOS. A certain breed of manager would've decided this internal competition was "bad" and would've spent a year figuring out which one to invest in because "two OSs are bad". Rather than getting paralyzed with indecision, it's nearly always better to ship earlier and figure out what to do later. Look no further than Windows to see why. Steve Ballmer, who came up as the business head of Windows, saw everything through the lens of Windows everywhere. So when smartphones became a thing, what did he do? Adapt the Windows OS to phones of course. Microsoft lost time to market and Windows Phone went nowhere. Years earlier Microsoft bought the then popular Sidekick and rather than rolling with it they spent years figuring out how to move it to Windows. This can of course go wrong. Anything can. But in a sufficiently large organization your attitude should be how to handle internal competition not how do you eliminate it. The latter is a fool's errand.