19 ms·

Why is everything so hard in a large organization?

• cable2600 5y ago
  Politics, favoritism, nepotism, incompetence, and working synergy with a team also spoils things because you never get synergy.
  • qznc 5y ago
    You describe the symptoms. The article goes deeper.
    • fidesomnes 5y ago
      They unironically used the word synergy, they are clearly a part of the problem.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      The article mentions prisoners dilemma, but prisoners dilemma is not really an apt description of the bureaucratic corruption that always appear in large organizations. Rather it is a tragedy of the commons where people tries to take as much of company resources/power for themselves. That mode of thinking explains most of the problems trying to get things done in companies, nobody wants to give up the resources/power they managed to capture even if it would help the company if they did, because it wouldn't help those people.
      • YawningAngel 5y ago
        It isn't a prisoner's dilemma because there isn't an upside to the individuals if everyone cooperates
      • andyferris 5y ago
        Tragedy of the commons is a multi-party prisonner's dilemma, right?
        • Jensson 5y ago
          No, on average people would benefit if they worked together but in a tragedy of the commons situation often a many individuals abuse the resource so much that they wouldn't benefit from cooperating. See for example Californias water use situation, California is over using water each year and its aquifers are depleting, but the farmers who use all the water wouldn't benefit from all the farmers stopping. Similarly if someone worked their way up by creating a really important bottleneck everyone has to go through rather than facilitating productivity in others, the company and many other employees would benefit if he changed but he wouldn't benefit from losing his reports and thus well paying job. This is different from prisoners dilemma where everyone benefits if everyone cooperated.
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Large organizations are usually internally run like communist states with planned economies and share the same pathologies. They are basically dictatorships, have 5 year plans, leadership that’s detached from the reality of the base, a lot of effort is put into propaganda, there are many people whose only job is to check on other people, the fruit of successes goes to only a few, and so on. Same structure, same outcome.
  • unnah 5y ago
    There is some truth to that, but large companies do have to keep their customers at least somewhat happy, and can't quite beat them up whenever they think of switching to another supplier... although I suppose you could argue the point with some monopolies.
  • tehjoker 5y ago
    Funny that the solution to that would be some kind of democratic centralism, anaethema to business people but consistent with a branch of communist theory. The reason the businesses are run centrally planned is because the alternative is introducing internal markets within the company which create high internal transaction costs, brutal politics, and duplicative effort.
• bantunes 5y ago
  I wonder how "bullshit jobs" and the fact a lot of people in large organizations are not really into the mission factor into this.
  • hef19898 5y ago
    I would ad busy work, stuff that isn't per she useless but not really needed right now. Easy to end up doing that instead of the really needed things, because they make you look productive while not being counter productive. Result is nothing advances. Usually people do that when the right-now things are hard and involve facing some hard truths. Even more so if that is implicitly encouraged by higher ups (management, founders...).
• papito 5y ago
  I would say, the bystander effect. The more people you have, the more you have the tendency to think "oh, someone else will pick it up". I am guilty of that myself. In a small team where I know no one is coming to help me, I step up and become 10x productive.
  • nherment 5y ago
    Not sure about the bystander effect applied within an organization but hasn't this theory been discredited following recent research? Cf. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0000469 https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0000469
    • papito 5y ago
      Does everyone try to help? And if only one person helps in a crisis, even most of the time, how does that translate to organizational psychology?
• dsr_ 5y ago
  "Everything" really means "changes that I think would be better for me/the company/the world", because if you are happy with what the company is doing, you don't need to change anything. In a truly large organization, it takes institutional knowledge to identify who will have to make a change, who maintains it long term, and who will be impacted. Then you need to convince each group that the change you want is desirable. Sometimes this is as easy as convincing the person in charge of the group. A large one-time change is often easier than a small change to daily procedures. As your knowledge of how the organization operates grows, so will your ability to find the necessary people and phrase things in terms of their interests. In a thousand-plus person corporation, I would expect this to take at least a year or two.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    Which is why politics is always an important part of large companies. In order to get anything done you need to convince a lot of important people that it would benefit them to allow this project. Those people then consider how much they and others could leverage the project to expand their power and influence in the company, if it isn't net positive for them they probably wont agree to it.
• davidgl 5y ago
  See the work on Scaling Laws that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West has been working on at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute, there are loads of interviews on youtube where he summaries his work.
  • gilbetron 5y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation, I just grabbed his book :)
• peakaboo 5y ago
  Didn't read the article but the answer is because of collaboration. As soon as a task requires other teams involved, it becomes really slow and hard to coordinate and understand how something actually works. You gain true expertise only by understanding everything yourself and then you are also extreamly fast at accomplishing your tasks.
  • samhw 5y ago
    Didn't read your comment but the answer is the mating habits of the common walrus, Odobenus rosmarus.
• nikkinana 5y ago
  Not China, they do what they're told.
• KineticLensman 5y ago
  I think the article has some good points about interpersonal comms and alignment problems and their solutions but doesn't actually mention some of the structural / political issues associated with really large organisations. For example, I have worked at or seen organisations that are actually loose groupings of 'cottage industries' (often called divisions or similar) that have separately evolved local solutions to problems (technical /commercial, etc) with a small centralised head-office. Moving between divisions is hard because they are running separate systems. Aligning their processes can improve efficiencies but can also lead to loss of local knowledge or inappropriate one-size-fits-all solutions.
  • Agentlien 5y ago
    The biggest example of your last point that I've seen first hand is Electronic Arts and Frostbite. Mandating that all EA games be made with their own engine has caused so many delays, rushed games, and broken products by teams who have already proven they can deliver amazing games on their own terms.
  • Macha 5y ago
    I worked for such a fragmented company before. The team I joined was effectively still the startup that had been acquired by that company 7-8 years prior to my joining. Since the group continued to make profits that were growing most of the time, they were largely left autonomous by head office for 90% of their work even over such a large time period. There were people in some of the US offices which formerly had belonged to that startup that would describe themselves as working for that startup despite joining after the startup had already been absorbed into the parent company. This division wasn't the only such division in the company. There were certainly negatives, an internal transfer was effectively a new hire, just one who already had their email/git/vpn access sorted and probably already spoken to a few of the cross org teams like IT or security, but overall I never felt as much organisational friction as other teams I've worked in large companies. Anyway, the parent company was acquired by a much larger one, that much larger one acquired a similar size company with a much more top down/unified approach to direction, and given that unified approach they were much more effective at selling a vision to our parent companies execs, so a lot of them were put in charge despite the original parent company being profitable and the new acquisition not being so. There was a big push to standardise/centralise/etc. and in that time a few products stagnated and we lost customers. The newly acquired company has a pretty poor track record in dead/broken acquisitions from this pattern, so it shouldn't have been news that prioritizing this has costs. There was a lot of grumbling at being made move to "standardised" solutions that were suboptimal in meaningful ways, but were preferred at high levels because they were homegrown. Everything certainly took longer in the new company, dealing with centralised, barely informed non-stakeholders who still had red tape in place to get anything done, along with a strong impulse to just copy other teams rather than come up with a solution that cleanly and effectively solves the problem. I left during this process, and a lot of the people who were the core of the startup-turned-business-unit also left, the largest group now at a rapidly growing competitor.
• dreen 5y ago
  I tried to get people to record meetings and link them to features being discussed, so that working on a feature you can review everything that was said. IMHO it would reduce the amount of unnecessary conversation by 50% and save everyone a lot of time and trouble. The initiative failed, because not everyone was eager to give consent. Its their right, but I think if you dont want something to be recorded, it probably shouldnt be said at all in a work meeting.
  • mewpmewp2 5y ago
    Might be easier with transcripts, but with recordings it takes a lot of effort to find the correct recording, and correct place to find the correct information that you have a question about. As well as needing to know that your question might be in one of the recordings. So it just also becomes easier to re-ask the question even if it was already discussed somewhere.
    • dreen 5y ago
      I agree, and tbh we had automatic transcripts as well (a feature of MS Teams), but its the same issue, you need to be able to record/capture in the first place
  • NikolaNovak 5y ago
    It's a tricky balance between a useful records, and stifling peoples comfort to discuss and speak openly. General solution is to send "meeting notes" at the end - sounds bureaucratic, but it's exactly what you describe - a chance to document and verify "hey all, this is why we agreed on, right?" As well as provide that summary to others who missed it. Ultimately way more useful than transcripts and thus always worth it's time - yes one person will spend 20mjn writing it up, but it'll save time of at least 20min times number of people missing or distracted , plus any time that would've been lost due to misalignment or poor memory etc.
    • dreen 5y ago
      Yep thats the normal way. But this can fail on many levels, for instance if the notetaker doesnt understand the problem as well as people talking, they kinda just agree to whatever was written because the thing is still fresh in their mind, then someone who wasnt even there comes to work on the feature a month later and the notes are no good, they need to chase a bunch of people. Even with a noisy transcript you at least dont loose anything, and everyone can still make notes in an async collaborative way > stifling peoples comfort to discuss and speak openly I know some people feel this way, which is why I wouldnt force it on anyone. But I think its a bit silly and they should get over it, were not on the meeting for appearances.
• bachmeier 5y ago
  The author of this piece frames this in terms of game theory. I honestly don't follow the line of argument. To me, it's simpler. The people running the organization put the wrong incentives in place. No need to complicate with individuals playing one-shot games and then finding a way to a coordination equilibrium as a solution. In large universities at least, the problem is that most of the people running the outfit start as faculty or low-level administrators, and they move into high-level administration positions without any understanding of how to do their jobs well, or for that matter, what it even means to do their jobs well. Most do not care. As long as the higher paycheck keeps getting deposited in their account every pay cycle, they feel they are doing their jobs.
  • arbitrage 5y ago
    I disagree -- my experience is that most of them care quite a bit.
  • avereveard 5y ago
    > The people running the organization put the wrong incentives in place. this assume that the organizations are mishandled. you don't need to posit such a requirement, it's even simpler, as the organization grow, the cost of mistakes increase, while the margins decrease. this is what requires controls structure to be put in place, slowing and weighting down operations. it's not a bad thing either, just the result of doing business at scale. many startup that find themselves at a significant market size quickly and quietly drop the "move fast and break things" culture, for the very same reason
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Perhaps it's more the cost of personal responsibility for mistakes increases. Bureaucratic inefficiency is a huge drag on profitability. But it becomes invisible in a way that obvious mistakes and failures don't. If a new project fails, it's an obvious failure. But there's no business metric that tells a company how much it's wasting on pointless processes and paperwork. So even though the cost of wastage can be bigger than a high profile failure, it never appears in the accounts. There is a flip side, which is the rando CEO who goes on an uninformed acquisition spree and blows $x bn on companies that don't integrate and end up being a huge net loss. Or starts numerous reorgs and rebrands which add more friction to no benefit.
• twobitshifter 5y ago
  Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. Amazon is the most egregious. > . A software developer could write a simple e-commerce website in a few days; Amazon employs 1,335,000 people [source]. Those 1.4 million people are not coding the e-commerce app but making e-commerce happen as package handlers, drivers, finance teams, etc. on top of that Amazon has many non e-commerce related projects: building hardware (Kindles, Alexa, etc) , AWS and support, and on and on.
  • jasode 5y ago
    >Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. You misread it. The author is not equating them; he's contrasting them. Simplicity-of-proof-of-concept vs complexity of real-world-AmaFaceGoog.
    • ivan_gammel 5y ago
      The author puts as a reason some internal objectives of the corporation not visible to an observer behind the simple idea of their website. But contrast focused on them is wrong, it is comparison between apples and asteroids. The complexity of a corporation is created from external factors: E.g. Google or Facebook are not a search engine or social network (both even in current scale would require significantly less people to implement and maintain). They are advertisement businesses compliant with local regulations, serving different audiences and optimizing variety of financial KPIs set by investors. Just naming and understanding all those factors is beyond intellectual abilities of a single person and this is why big organizations are really difficult: it is not due to complexity of relationships between people or misalignment (they are just derivatives), but due to complexity of the problems such organizations are dealing with.
  • planb 5y ago
    That's what I thought, too. Amazon is a bad example, maybe for Twitter, you could make the case. But not for the reasons the article mentions: Sure, there's some overhead due to communication and misaligned incentives, but most of the work goes into the hidden complexity that even the simplest tasks contain when rolled out to millions of people. And I'm not only talking about technical complexity - I'd be interested how many people Twitter employs just for checking reported tweets.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• lightbendover 5y ago
  The article actually jumps right to the three major points that I see, rephrased to: (1) misaligned priorities, (2) policy flux, and (3) attrition. The most damning trend I have witnessed first hand is that directors have extreme agency and are most of the time not incentivized to help other directors, especially if they’re under a different VP or SVP. The high-level leadership are too detached from the details (as they should be — but this is the thing that is most different in large orgs — it becomes more and more difficult to know everything, eventually becomes impossible, and then even knowing “enough” becomes impossible) to make centralized decisions so you’re left with one organization at a standstill with another, which causes attrition in the lower ranks of people who just want to get stuff done. That attrition results directly in knowledge loss and overall reduced productivity, which hampers most teams from breaking out of their set of problems. And it all just gets worse with time. Large companies have way more guardrails and standards than smaller companies and they also change at a greater rate. Since these policies so rarely help improve or ship features, it’s just an ever-increasing source of productivity loss from the perspective of someone who wants to get stuff done. When internal politics are complained about, this is typically the root cause. Hiring and retaining talent becomes harder as all companies grow and previous top talents becomes disenfranchised over time. Average talent hits an inflection point and then begins a descent. This just adds fuel to the fire, but I believe things would still become extremely difficult without this trait as well. All of this becomes only more difficult to deal with over time as the company increases in size and age. Nepotism, cronyism, etc.. all factor in as well, but those issues also affect small organizations and their impact there is even higher.
  • jiggawatts 5y ago
    > Since these policies so rarely help improve or ship features, it’s just an ever-increasing source of productivity loss from the perspective of someone who wants to get stuff done. When internal politics are complained about, this is typically the root cause. "Why do I have to fill in this mountain of paperwork, in triplicate, just to get permission to do this basic activity that is an essential part of my job, and hence the permission being granted is a foregone conclusion anyway?" "Eleven years ago a guy named Bob tried something similar and screwed up terribly." "But not the same?" "No, but similar. So anyway now we have a 'process' to make sure nothing like that will ever happen again." "Is Bob liable to make the same mistake?" "Oh no, he's learned his lesson. Also, he was fired a year later, so he's not around anyway." "So, has anyone made the same mistake since?" "No." "Do you think I'll make the same mistake?" "I don't believe so, no." "So why do I have to fill out the paperwork to avoid making a mistake we all know I won't make, especially now that I've been made aware of it." "Just in case." "Just in case, what?" "Well, how do we know that you won't make mistakes? We have to have proof, some sort of written evidence." "But you can't prove ahead of time that people won't make mistakes! People don't make mistakes on purpose, so no amount of paperwork will ever stop mistakes happening." "You're just being argumentative now. You're not special, everyone has to do the paperwork." "Why everyone? You just said only Bob ever made the mistake!" "HR told us that we can't make rules just for Bob, so everyone has to follow the same rules. That's fair." "But you don't need the paperwork any more, you got rid of Bob!" "Yes, but the process has been established, it would take a lot of time and effort -- and paperwork -- to change it now." "It's less than making everyone jump through unnecessary hoops just to do their jobs!" "Maybe, but I'm very busy. Back-to-back meetings to discuss important matters, like how several staff are behind on their paperwork and may need to be disciplined." etc, etc, etc... I've had conversations like that -- nearly verbatim -- at several organisations in contexts such as: "Why does it take four weeks to add a firewall rule?" and: "Why is the minimum permitted change turnaround time two months?" and: "Why can't person responsible for system X have access to said system X?"
• brightball 5y ago
  Communication multiples due to the number of people involved.
  • nemo44x 5y ago
    I’ve experienced this myself in companies that have gone from <100 people to thousands over a handful of years. In the small days it’s easy to stay current and coordinated with everything. As the company grows new teams are added, there’s more specialization and teams begin looking more inward as their size has grown. You don’t realize it right away but your processes, methods, and networks are breaking down with the new scale and what was once effective stops being so. But it’s hard to detect right away - it’s the “boiled frog” problem. The company defines themes or goals or priorities and small cross team groups are assembled but it only gives the illusion of being coordinated. You still have a bunch of teams vaguely working towards solving a greater problem but not actually working together. There’s a general sense of “losing our way” and disillusion from the veterans who don’t recognize the company anymore and attrition sets in causing even more disillusion and attrition. The company is growing headcount but it seems like everyone is leaving. I think this is the point (hopefully we’ll before) the company realizes the old ways that got them there don’t work so well as to get them to the next place. What I’ve found works is senior management that can not only identify what the company priorities should be but also understand that every team should participate in it and allow the teams to determine how to execute. Defining programs and having coordinators work with the stakeholders helps scale communication and coordination. It’s another layer that wasn’t needed in earlier days of the company but becomes critical in my experience. And the cycle begins again. If the company does achieve the next level of scale similar problems will set in as coordinating 3000 people is just as different than coordinating 15,000 as it was from 700 to 3000. More layers of indirection are required.
    • mellavora 5y ago
      The fun thing about Dunbar's number is that he nails these transitions pretty cleanly. The breaks happen (roughly) at every 3x in growth. What works for 5 people works for 15, but breaks at 16 (plus/minus 2, depends on the team). What works for 16 works up to 45/50 (3X15). Next breakpoint at 150 (3x50), the 'classic' Dunbar number. likewise at 500, 1500, 4K,... and it all comes down to communication bandwidth. The same scaling laws which lead to the cortical columns in the visual cortex specializing into different kinds of signal detection (edges, motion, ...). You can only maintain close connections with so many people.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  It's hard because it's meant to be hard. Once you have a large org that's making money, you don't really know exactly why it makes money. Sure, there's annual filings and there's still the elevator pitch of what the org does. But the actual how of how it works is difficult to describe in causal terms: if team X or Y was not there, the business would do better/worse? How does this team interact with that? It's really a bunch of informal relationships between different people, and both the people and the relationships change over time. So what you want to do when you know the whole sorta-works and you want to keep it that way is you pour glue all over it. You try to formalize processes, you give people titles and you make hierarchies. That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction. The side effect is of course that everyone who works there can see ways to improve things, but they can't see a way to get those improvements implemented.
  • kindle-dev 5y ago
    I've heard this effect put into more positive terms: If the ship is on a good course, making it hard to steer also makes it hard to sink.
    • __alexs 5y ago
      There are no courses that don't eventually intersect with land, or other ships...
      • WJW 5y ago
        Other ships, who can say. But if you are at about 60 degrees south of the equator and keep going due west (or east, of course) you can keep going forever without ever hitting land. You'll pass just below the southernmost point of Chile and just above the nothernmost parts of Antartica.
        • autosharp 5y ago
          > if you are at about 60 degrees south of the equator and keep going due west (or east, of course) you can keep going forever without ever hitting land. No, this requires you to constantly steer left (or right, of course). So you are not traveling on a straight line.
• hamilyon2 5y ago
  Does prisoner's dilemma really apply in your typical command and control scenario? When enough of person's future wages, wellbeing and so is being held hostage by single party, the choice is obvious. The article doesn't dive much into complexity of problem. Prisoner's dilemma doesn't have much place in traditional organisations. It is more subtle than that.
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  Couple of big things missing/brushed aside, really. 1) Uncertainty. On larger things, success is often uncertain (e.g., on new products, etc.), so the final consequences of the decisions are not known in advance 2) Generally, running processes well across an organization is not something that comes naturally. It needs investment in skills. For example, most meetings should have an agenda and should end with next steps as well as agreed and assigned actions. Tracking and planning similarly need effort and skill. It might very well be that on top of it the incentives are wrong for people to take risks in (1) or developed skills for (2) or even to cooperate in the first place, but most people are not naturally good at administration to start with.
• giantg2 5y ago
  The tag at the very bottom answers the title question - bureaucracy. It doesn't have to involve the prisoners dilema.
  • namenotrequired 5y ago
    That only answers "What is it called". It doesn't answer the question that the author asks, which is "why"
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I don't see that. Bureaucracy is why everything is so hard in a large organization. This does answer the question. If they want to dig into why large organizations have bureaucracy, or what that bureaucracy is made of, then a different question can be posed. The prisoners dilemma is only a small part of this.
• cousin_it 5y ago
  The larger an organization gets, the more typical a chunk of society it is, so its effectiveness gets closer to the societal average, and further from whatever can make a small organization special. I think this explanation covers all other explanations I've seen.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  I find this amazingly insightful. One thing I've been thinking lately is, what if everyone had as part of their "goals"/"performance review" structure -- how have you helped another team (in a non-close branch of reporting structure) do their job/accomplish their goals better? It's probably naively optimistic to think there's a bureaucratic solution to bureaucracy though, which is basically what that suggestion is.
• black_13 5y ago
  Zero sum thnking. My organization the young or more pointedly the inexperienced are put in charge and don’t realize the gravity of their decisions or solutions to problems they think they are still in college or that what they are working on is a mcpaper. When you screw up at or near the csuite level you cause collateral damage. Also Americans are notoriously selfish to the point that as a nation we should be classified or diagnosed some place in the DSMV. People make decisions solely for themselves and only inform themselves even in harmless contexts.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Complexity scales with node count. This leaves an opening for talented folks who embrace the complexity and figure out how to get things done.
• ajb 5y ago
  It seems like a lot of people here have been in an ineffective large organisation and an effective startup. I've worked at an effective large organisation and an ineffective startup, so perhaps I can shed some light on what these kind of processes are for: * You don't get to be a large organisation without accumulating generations of previous products. Well, unless you're google and can regularly fire your customers without going bust. but part from them, you start to need processes just to track what's going on. (The ineffective startup accumulated previous product attempts too, and is still paying for a lot of pointless infra because no-one still there knows which ones can be switched off). * At a large scale, it starts to be pretty difficult to maneuver if each dept of 30-50 people has built or contracted all their own infra & services. Some divergence is useful for agility, but a lot of it is just waste and actually slows you down when you want two depts to work together on something - or even prevents useful collaboration. An effective organisation will make the tradeoff consciously. * When you complete dozens of projects per year, it starts to be possible to invest in researching and rolling out best practices in areas where a startup just has to go with the simple/obvious answer. When my startup employer moved, it was pretty onerous, and there was a bunch of stuff we never found again. The large org had so many offices that it had a full time dept just for moving offices. (They weren't dumb, each move consolidated offices -but they kept buying other companies). When they moved us, it was like magic - we went home on a friday and went to work on a monday in the new office, and everything was set up. Well, we had to set up the lab ourselves, but
  • ___luigi 5y ago
    This is GREAT summary! I work in a large organization, in an industry that is naturally slow. The work (in the industry) is slow because it's critical to deliver stable and reliable solution because large part of population and economy rely on this industry SW/HW. I have heard a lot of complains on how the process is slow, but in many cases, building on top of existing work takes a long time. It takes long time to understand legacy work, to go through older studies and projects, and to find spots to add contributions. Not all of us work on green field projects, but many of us maintain code/work that doesn't look "cool".
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > It seems like a lot of people here have been in an ineffective large organisation and an effective startup. I was at an effective startup that turned into an ineffective large organization before my own eyes. Your three (excellent) points ring very true. However, the company actually tried to implement each of your three points and recognized their importance. The problem was in the execution. Old products: These were neither retired nor given appropriate resources, so they instead decayed over time. Empty promises about longevity were made and then broken. Attempts were made to outsource maintenance to countries with the cheapest engineers, which backfired when each update become more buggy than the last. The end result was a lot of customers and early adopters getting burned and a destruction of our reputation in the industry. Shared infrastructure: The C-levels saw shared infrastructure as an opportunity to reduce costs and speed up development, but they took it too far. At the worst, they wanted to have one gigantic team of back-end engineers, one gigantic team of front-end engineers, and so on, spread across every project across the entire company. Individual engineers were assigned to many projects and each had to deal with multiple managers fighting for their time. End result was that nothing got done and politics reigned supreme as the way to get attention on your project. Best practices: The company hired “subject matter experts” to enforce best practices. They were expected to be involved in everything across the company. Imagine being hired as the “security best practices owner” and then told that you’re accountable for the security of everything at the whole company. Instead of promoting best practices, they went into full defensive mode and interfered with the shipment of every product and feature that they didn’t have time to work on. We would have products ready to ship and have the best practices experts panicking to halt it because they wouldn’t have time to look at it for months after completion. Getting them involved at the start was a pipe dream. The overarching issue was that they tried to do big company practices in the move fast and break things startup style. For every well-intentioned move toward being a proper company they managed to screw it up by trying to inject startup-style speed and improvisation.
• alfl 5y ago
  Large organizations are hard for startup people but easy for people who want a straightforward job. In a sense sitting in meetings and making decks is an easy way to make a decent amount of money. If you are self-driven and seeking to improve things and do cool work these jobs are psychologically quite difficult. I was always frustrated, first as an enterprise guy, then as a consultant. Eventually I started a company and quit my job, and then it clicked.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    My job is anything but straight-forward in a large org. I have witnessed entire departments or "orgs" sit idle for almost a year while management did a huge dance to figure out the budget. This involved a lot of reliance on various lower lever employees. Once that was done, finally, we then began the process of figuring out how to spend the money fast enough in the time we had left until the next budget-dance--fast approaching. I was an engineer (high level but still) and spent most of my time helping management not look like complete idiots to their managers. When it came to actual engineering I had to beg the help of so many shared services that I rarely knew how to proceed. It usually came down to finding someone who had been there their whole career to find out which one of their friends knew how to initiate some process...to get an EC2 instance in AWS. High degree of chaos and stress and nothing of real value got done. To top it all off, when you find out who your customer is you realize they are guilty of war crimes. I went there to build data pipelines for high volume telemetry. I sort of worked on that, but not really. I met numerous people who lamented that they would look back on their career and be able to say they went to some meetings. It is not healthy, on many levels. "Psychologically difficult" is a very diplomatic take.
    • alfl 5y ago
      Ha! Thanks, in my journey through enterprise (that was very similar to yours) I learned a lot about diplomacy :)
  • Ocerge 5y ago
    It me, straightforward-job-haver at a FAANG. I bounced around from startups to small companies, and eventually ended up at big tech due to the anxiety/uncertainty small orgs were giving me. A lot of (maybe privileged) people like that drive as it motivates them, but to me it was more concern about what I would do if the paychecks stopped. I'm much more happy working on boring shit at a big tech company. Not here to change the world, just to work with competent people and plan for my future.
• amosj 5y ago
  I've said no several times when asked if I'd be interested in management - I like writing code and solving problems, management is only vaguely necessary in some bureaucratic unfortunate way. I would say that that approach to writing software defined my 20s. But in the past few years I've become fascinated by the problem of organization and it's made me appreciate good management so much more - getting more than two people to act in concert is _hard_. Getting 10 or 30 or 1000 of them is so much harder. If I think about it too much I start wondering how anything ever gets done at all, anywhere
  • rpmisms 5y ago
    This is part of why I want to move towards management. I'm not an incredibly gifted developer, I don't live and breathe code, but I do understand the process and the challenges that get tossed at devs, and would love to make their lives easier.
• shoto_io 5y ago
  I think one of the only large companies who has worked this out is Apple. I would love to know how they pulled this off.
  • cube00 5y ago
    Given their recent moves you could argue they're still learning like the rest of us.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I don't know if this topic has a name (study of work social structures) but it fascinates me. I see so much counter intuitive events, misery, and low efficacy that I cannot stop thinking about what are the major forces at play
  • quirkot 5y ago
    The field is called Organizational Behavior if you're looking for scholarly info
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      godly many welcomes :)
• zz865 5y ago
  Missing is fraud, auditors, regulators, lawsuits etc which seem to rule big orgs and small companies largely ignore.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    I landed in a great startup (lucky me) where the IT infra manager had an entire fake environment for the PCI auditors. So many laughs. They hired a info sec manager eventually, who wrote stacks of policies and put us through numerous successful and legit PCI audits...but yeah, that was one example of the regulations being skirted. There was a constant barrage of legal issues though that consumed three in-house lawyers.
  • larsrc 5y ago
    Also having to deal with the differences between different markets, internationalisation, auditing required at larger size, greater reliability requirements, etc. And over time, the first designs will turn out to have problems, so you have to rewrite/replace/refactor, which may end up having multiple systems running in parallel for a long time. Complexity accretes.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• didip 5y ago
  It is as simple as having too many middle managers. It doesn't matter how large or small the companies are. Each one need to justify the existence of their department. And to get promoted, they usually need to hire more middle managers. These departments will inevitably have confusing directives and even non-sensical overlapping products. Eventually the built-up inertia becomes too large.
• netcan 5y ago
  Ronald Coase won the nobel prize in economics for his "transaction costs" solution to the "why do firms even exist" question. A lot of economics is about asking a question the right way. He started with "if markets are so great and stuff, why do companies run like soviets & chiefdoms in practice? Why doesn't the product team just contract a UI designer, a testing team and such. Hi solution was "transaction costs." IE, it's too hard to find a designer every time you need a button. Economics and social science generally is prone to a "defend my model" problem. Once you have a model, there's a tendency to see everything in terms of that model. A Coasian sees everything in transaction costs terms. Coasians ran around This author seems to see everything in incentive & game theory terms. Management theory often prefers group psychology explanations like Dunbar's number. IMO, you should probably keep all in mind at once, and remember that none are entirely true. Even if you see the problem as "Prisoners Dilemma," the solution may not be "breaking the prisoner's dilemma." Human cooperation in groups to achieve aims is basically the secret sauce of human civilization, culture & what makes us different from other animals. If it could be predictably engineered, a lot of problems would have been solved already. Most, seemingly common sense solutions fail miserably. Trying to break prisoners' dilemmas by nailing all responsibility to someone (a) may be a lot more disruptive and aggressive than you imagined and (b) will often result in elaborate CYA responsibility avoidance. See enterprise consulting for a snapshot of a mature system described this way. One way or another, this problem has occured to many people over the years. It's not an easy one. Perhaps, it's the hard question of social science.
  • crdrost 5y ago
    > Most seemingly common sense solutions fail miserably. Trying to break prisoners' dilemmas by nailing all responsibility to someone (a) may be a lot more disruptive and aggressive than you imagined and (b) will often result in elaborate CYA responsibility avoidance. Or, that is what the management chain does and this is the only way to scale it. There is also a perspective on this which is along the lines of Turner's social evolution ideas. To recap that, bureaucracy is recast as a gene for a successful organization. For Turner, this is in some sense a very literal survival of the fittest, because he is asking the question, “why do modern militaries and governments regress to The State as their model, rather than the other governmental styles through history?” And his answer is that The State, or bureaucracy, is legit a better gene, it propagates itself and it propagates the organism better. “But, the thing we know about bureaucracies is that they are super inefficient, how can that be the best way to go?!” Well, maybe we need to revisit that. The modern military that is structured like a bureaucracy is vastly vastly larger than the militaries that are not. Is there a forcing function that would drive efficiency way down at these resource scales? And once he's asking that question the answer seems obvious, the same answer as in OP: corruption. In computing terms, a tree with fan-out 5 has 5/4 as many nodes as leaf nodes, with 10 you can drop to 10/9, so you have an 11% - 25% intrinsic overhead. (Substantially more in terms of cost of labor since they also want to be paid more than the front-line employee, which again suggests incentives.) We look at this minimum 20% waste and are shocked by it, but the claim is that the transition to bureaucracy starts to happen precisely when you are moving so many resources that the 2% of bad actors that slip through your vetting can sipon off 5x-10x what they actually need and produce a 10-20% corruption. This combination sets a Dunbar’s number, rather than it being some aspect of human evolutionary psychology. The cost was built into the game rules at these scales, it stops being waste and starts being opportunity cost, in the economic sense... Put another way, maybe it is not the hard question of social science, but a constraint in which social science necessarily operates?
• naasking 5y ago
  The biggest component of the answer is simple: risk aversion. The status quo has been working so far, and making changings introduces risk that things might no longer work. An organization will probably exhibit risk aversion comparable to the most risk averse decision maker in the a particular decision chain. This imparts the status quo a type of inertia.
  • draw_down 5y ago
    Yeah. I worked at a company that is now quite successful, and in early days one of the mottos was “bias to action”- it was felt that not doing things was a greater existential risk to the company than doing the wrong things. As the business grew and there was more at risk, that idea fell away, as one may argue should be the case. It became harder and harder to do things, layers of bureaucracy accreted. Now the risks have to do with protecting what has been built. A delay in shipping the next new feature won’t break the company, but going too fast and shipping something insecure would.
• dboreham 5y ago
  Also relevant: https://codahale.com/work-is-work/ https://codahale.com/work-is-work/
• ericalexander0 5y ago
  This line of thinking will eventually lead to Deming's 14 points. It's a failure in management. Bad to OK managers are managers that became managers - they never viewed it as a craft to improve. Great managers build muscles that allow them to see and manipulate the system. Read Working Backwards and it's clear Bezos got it.
• mathattack 5y ago
  I’ve given the opposite side of this question a lot of thought: given how hard it is to run a large organization, how do they stay in business? The only answer I’ve come up with is that economies of scale are much more important than most people think. And the economies of scale of a Walmart/GM/P&G/AT&T are so big that they override all the petty stupidity in those firms.
  • leokennis 5y ago
    Although it depends on the business the megacorp is in, reputation is also important. Would you entrust your live saving to FinanZly? Would you go on a family vacation in a car from DriveFlow.io? I think megacorps are mainly successful due to being the safe choice. People love loss aversion, and you never go wrong with Bank of America or Ford.
    • mathattack 5y ago
      Very true. “Nobody got fired for buying IBM” is a subtle form of economy of scale. And perhaps allowed them to extend their relevance well beyond what their internal disfunctions should have allowed.
  • wombatpm 5y ago
    K-Mart was eventually killed despite the economies of scale. Then again they were badly run starting in the 80s, and it only took another 30 years
    • mathattack 5y ago
      Very good example. They did everything wrong, got looted along the way, and still took more than two decades to finally die.
• achenatx 5y ago
  The increase in people increases the relationships and amount of communication geometrically. The increase in levels is like a game of telephone and reduces the fidelity of the message/strategy/goal from executive down to line level team members.
• jeffbee 5y ago
  Not a lot of evidence presented to support the idea in the headline. My personal experience is that large organizations can be very, very effective. Bureaucracy works. That's why it exists. In my experience it is the medium-sized organizations that are aggravating: too large for their original ad hoc processes to be effective, too small to develop better ones.
• funOtter 5y ago
  Once an organization gets large enough, the different divisions start competing with each other, essentially making several "smaller companies" within the large organization.
• tyingq 5y ago
  I think a large part of the problem is over-specialization. Once you have groups with a leader that are in charge of [something] narrow, they start trying to make [something] more important, more complex, etc, than it should be. For various reasons...exposure for career progression, empire building, etc. Then, when you need to get something from an idea into production, you're dealing with some large number of these groups. All of which have some form of demand management (jira tickets or similar), some form of requirements you have to meet, different ways of interaction, and so on. And, some of those groups have to work with other groups to do "task a" that you asked for. So you get this complicated dependency graph of tasks that's not even visible to you.
• vannevar 5y ago
  I think the author actually nails the primary reason in an aside: "As though that were not bad enough, in some organizations there's a separate compounding problem: limited resources. For an organization, attention resources are {time, money, staffing}. In that case you get to layer on the negotiation for resources among competing teams within an organization." While I think the other points are valid, this process of resource allocation alone probably explains most of the problem. As an organization grows, its resources grow proportionally, but the communication required to allocate those resources grows non-linearly. The overhead needed to get $50K from each of two people is more than twice that needed to get $100K from one person. Add in the other issues raised, and this core problem is exacerbated even further.
• darepublic 5y ago
  Good read, the citations are also good. The long story of why we can't have nice things, and why shower thoughts on reforming the system are doomed.
• lbriner 5y ago
  How much space do I have? I think the skin-in-the-game is very significant as the OP says. In a smaller organisation, you might have a person who does several things and one of those is HR. The existence and success of the company depends on hiring well so they do their best. Also, the more efficient they can be (sometimes the worse they can be) the quicker they can get back onto other things. In a large corporate, you now have an HR team. There is usually much less feedback on performance and it is easier to blame the org or the market for poor hires. Another issue is that most employees like most people are only average. A few are terrible and a few are excellent. We can be picky in a small company and find that great person with alignment to the vision etc. What about in your team of 10? You aren't going to find 10 great people so you get a whole range and now some are doing much less than 10th of the work of the team so the excellent people are now picking up the slack. Maintaining multiple communication paths is hard and risky. I worked with a Bank where each requirement spec was signed off by about 15 people (compliance, legal, marketing etc.) how complicated is it to make 1 change? Holidays, other priorities, change of staff etc. can make the smallest thing take really long. Ego: Some people simply cannot compromise. If you are the CEO, you might get away with it but what if someone else is throwing their toys out of the pram because e.g. the legal team need your product to look terrible for compliance reasons? Things you should just accept take weeks or months to argue out. Specialism: The head of e.g. marketing should have the final say on all things marketing ideally. But in many large companies, they might have a disagreement with people who might or might not know more about something but vocalise it anyway. This is magnified if you don't really trust your department heads are good at their job. Oh, so many more things. Is there an example out there of a large organisation that does work well or are there just too many variables to make large organisations work period?
• quantum_state 5y ago
  Based on my observations, suboptimal incentive policy leads to entropy barriers … overcoming entropy barriers requires time and effort if at all possible …
• dorianmariefr 5y ago
  Doesn't have to be, depends on the organization
• someothertime 5y ago
  Group think is well known, but it's also a force that works against individual think. Similar versions of the same symptom emerges as group hearing, group speach, and group action. Thinking alone is easy. Thinking with someone is hard. Now keep adding people. You stop thinking. Same with hearing. Listening to one person is easy. How about two people. If they don't share their time, you're listening to two people talk at once. Same with actions. With more people, thoughts become more ideological and less mobile. Same with speech, same with what they listen to, and same with their actions. And each individual is not only physically a fraction of the group, but so are their senses. And to act humane or to simply perform on an individual level is directly hindered by this group dynamic. Individuals then become lethargic, and begin to experience greater stress and pain. You could also think of this as the Group Flu. I know I've experienced it. It's the feeling you get when you know you need to talk to someone higher up just to be heard. It's the feeling you get when you're talking to a customer service rep and you know you're not talking to a person. Now take a large organization and we have a group of groups. We already know one group cannot do it all, and one group is too inefficient. But if we're just creating more groups, the problem persists. So what you need is to undo the group dynamic. But then again, with a big successful organization, maybe change is what you don't want? Ideology is what you do want, and suppressing the individuals leads to your ongoing success.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    There's also a balancing effect from being in a group. Thinking alone is easy, as is going insane in your own belief. Other people acts as averager, additional data points.
    • backwheni 5y ago
      Balancing how? Say each member has a point, and additional members have counterpoints to balance the group. What exactly happened? As a member with a point countered, you've effectively been silenced. You have a group where extremes are neutralized. That is either a set goal by whomever controls the group, or works towards the greater ideology that becomes the group voice and group think that no one member can overturn. You don't need to be in a group to have additional data points. Thinking alone might be easy, but not thinking in a group is also easy. That's what most members end up doing.
• yamrzou 5y ago
  Because adding more engineers to a project increases communication overhead. Obligatory Tweet: https://twitter.com/RichRogers_/status/1159872097205805056 https://twitter.com/RichRogers_/status/1159872097205805056
• motohagiography 5y ago
  The triad of solutions to the prisoners dilemma gives some really fast heuristics. e.g. if time-boxed, then reduce consensus; if hero req'd, give up credit; if consensus req'd, give up time commitments, etc. The best easy book I can recommend about large organizations is Smith & DeMesquita's "Dictator's Handbook" because it provides a practical applied model for determining incentives between groups. Reality is, the people you are dealing with are running their own mental version of the model, where the coalition that keeps them employed and prevailing is made up of essentials, influentials, and interchangeables. They intuit a salience matrix of stakeholders (decision power, vs. how much stakeholder cares), and while everything is dynamic, it is usually within these parameters. It's a tool that can provide fast insight into group/project/org behavior pretty well.
• cascom 5y ago
  Compliance and risk - small organizations don’t even know all the laws/regulations they’re breaking, or in many cases the risks they are taking on. And if they screw something up, it could put them out of business, but it won’t cost 20x what was invested (which could be the case in a large organization)
• knorker 5y ago
  > The Prisoner's dilemma is the reason. It's not that simple. A bigger org is slower often because it does bigger things. No, you can't just buy a tractor even though it'll be cheaper and faster for your project than to do all the work to do internal billing to rent the tractor the company already owns. Because if everyone did that then we'd have a thousand tractors and there's nowhere to put them, and we don't have time to sell them, nor do we know how to sell them. And your button on your website is not a one-line change because you're contracting with the US government and the contract has ADA clauses, and it needs 34 language translations. And no you can't make that change because last time someone improvised in this space we got dragged in front of congress and were made to promise to not do that again. So you need to follow procedures, and talk to product councel for exemptions. And you can't change that API because 6000 developers rely on that, and they need to launch before cyber monday. Sure, in that last case that's prisoners dilemma misalignment, but to be clear it's you who are misaligned with the goals of the business, so don't do it. It's not reasonable to suggest a solution of "why don't everyone just stop and do what I want". If you want to tell 10k people to stop what they're doing to work on your thing, then it'd better be right. Which means you'd better know what those 10k people were already doing. And you don't. And you can't just do it alone because it's 100 human-years worth of effort even if nobody's in your way, and you need to launch within 2 years or it's pointless to launch at all. That's what hard about making large changes in large orgs. Actually, correction: it's not even that simple.
  • asdfman123 5y ago
    A big problem is that orgs get so big that norms can't be gatekept by individuals. In a small org, Bob down the hall enforces standards. In large orgs, they need to apply to the whole org -- so you have documents and committees. The latter are much slower and more difficult to change.
• AdrianB1 5y ago
  My personal experience with large organizations (over 100,000 people) is that everything is so hard because 10-20% of the people do most of the work and the others are not just minor contributors, but many times just roadblocks. For example 1 hour ago I was discussing with my business counterpart about a project we are working on. We just got approval to hire 4 more people (that means we have to hire them, it is not optional) and half of them are diversity targets (meaning: skills are irelevant, we will get them anyway) and the other 2 will be hired and given to us without knowing what are the skills we need. Based on such organization dynamics, we plan to be sufficient without these 4 people and if any of them has any useful skills, it will be a nice surprise. At the same time, we need to give them some work to do, so we need to invent some roles that should be as harmless as possible. This is just a project, in my department of ~100 people about half are just mouth breathing, but it makes it a lot more complicated for the ~ 20-30 that do work to just do their work: some of these people have invented roles to rubber stamp steps in the projects, so they are adding 10-20 steps and a few days of work just to justify their existence. With the department half the size, everything would be much simpler, faster and even more productive.
• throwmamatrain 5y ago
  I have definitely experienced effective small org -> ineffective large org. Lots of make work, "lawyers don't get paid to simplify". Growing from small to large company you can end up with a lot of bureaucrats that tell you things like "this policy is what big cos do", but is really entrenching their position and keeping them employed. Creates adversarial relationship between devs and IT/ops/sec. They don't have it easy, because one leak or bad PR due to data and they're shot into space. Best to move to small effective teams, move fast, and show value. Often by currying favour of C/SVP you can get barriers removed fast and get things done. Ecosystem is large, so find your niche. Seen entire teams destroyed by well meaning PMs and other idealists implementing a "system" leading to dev/project slowdown and even abandon. Adding a couple check boxes to a JIRA process seems simple, but every choice is multiplied by the number of developers you have. You can see this in places that implement scrum poorly. I'm reminded of this slide: https://speakerdeck.com/holman/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github?slide=56 https://speakerdeck.com/holman/how-github-uses-github-to-bui... Overly complex security policies, JIRA check pointing, and constant meetings can grind you up. A lot of it is mistrust of employees, or employees also don't have enough context to do what they need to do. It is also entirely possible that I am a particular type, attracted to small/medium fast movers, and then I get tired of battling security/ops/managers for access to systems/data I need to do work, or the new sets of flaming hoops to jump through to do completely mundane tasks. You can always roll the dice! Bonne chance!
• bwestergard 5y ago
  This is not really an appropriate invocation of the prisoner's dilemma, because the essential feature of that thought experiment is that the participants cannot communicate, and that it is a single round. In a large organization, everyone i a repeat player and communicate to at least a limited extent.
• lkrubner 5y ago
  For anyone interested, I wrote a fairly detailed case study of some of the difficulties faced when trying to reinvent the technology stack at one of the world's largest car rental companies: "Why are large companies so difficult to rescue (regarding bad internal technology)" http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-large-companies-so-difficult-to-rescue-regarding-bad-internal-technology http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-large-companies...
• aazaa 5y ago
  > The Prisoner's dilemma is the reason. There might be a way of doing complex multi-participant tasks that is better than what's being done currently, but the incentives for each participant are not aligned. Even when that lack of alignment produces a suboptimal outcome, each participant in the process lacks skin in the game. Each participant in the process creating the suboptimal outcome is not accountable for the consequence of their collective action. The article goes on to describe solutions without actually explaining how the Prisoner's Dilemma operates in large companies. This makes the article less valuable than it could be because it interferes with the reader developing a mental model of the problem. For a take on this that does present a very clear (and possibly actionable) mental model, see "The Gervais Principle": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... The idea is based on the axiom that "organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs."
• tomcart 5y ago
  This piece is based on learnings from working in a government beauracracy but has lessons for any large organisation. https://profserious.substack.com/p/10-things-i-learnt-in-government https://profserious.substack.com/p/10-things-i-learnt-in-gov...
• shadowtree 5y ago
  Dependency management. Why is everything so hard in a large code base? Same reason.
• bjornsing 5y ago
  You can dress it up in game theory, but it basically comes down to this thing we call… politics.
• doctor_eval 5y ago
  I’m a small company guy - worked in startups for 30 years - and every time I’ve had to work with senior managers who come in after cutting their teeth in large companies I end up heading for the door. The goals and motivations of large companies are really different to small companies. Large companies are all about risk management - at heart they are about revenue defence - while effective small companies should be all about attack. Being disruptive in a small company is the reason they exist; disruption in a large company is confronting and to be resisted. Going from one to the other is likely to be super stressful. Unfortunately, as I’ve experienced, you do get these same problems in small companies run by big company people who think they know better. In my experience they just add weight. They don’t understand YAGNI. IMO the discipline and skills needed to run a startup, especially pre revenue, are very different from those needed for an established company. It’s not that one is less disciplined than the other. But the size of a small company gives them benefits and room to move that a large company can’t touch. Small companies are already risky so a bit of extra risk doesn’t count for much. It’s to be embraced.
  • aahortwwy 5y ago
    Currently working at a startup where a lot of recent hires have come from large organizations. All of them cite "bureaucracy and red tape" as reasons for joining a small company, but at least half of them have set about establishing exactly the sort of bureaucracy and red tape they claim to be fleeing. I think that large company experience is valuable, but you probably don't want to be the startup they're cutting their teeth on. And if you're going to absorb those types of people, best to do it gradually. Make sure they don't comprise a majority of your workforce.
    • doctor_eval 5y ago
      Thank you so much for writing this, you could easily be talking about my current company. I'm actually losing the battle against bureaucracy, and feeling pretty lost. Despite my long experience, the more I push back, the more I seem to reinforce the idea that I don't know what I'm doing - because I refuse to waste my time on bullshit. I'm the founder, and you'd think I'd have a say, but I don't. Yet I've been doing this for long enough to know that, at least, I'm less wrong than they think. At least I'm not the only one to experience this! But I have no idea how to tackle it.
• vmh1928 5y ago
  I've always thought if you paid people in large orgs a bonus for every task completed early you'd get a whole different sort of behavior.
  • asdfman123 5y ago
    If you did that, you'd get a lot of tasks completed early. The next question is: how do you ensure those tasks are actually improving things? At my company they reward "impact" and base promotions on that. The problem with that is now we have a zillion internal tools that need to be maintained. Lots of things were indeed built, but did they make things better for the rest of the org?
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Why? I'm not sure, let's schedule a meeting to discuss further
• Iv 5y ago
  I guess that's part of the Dilbert principle: organizations grow until they outgrow the organizational capabilities of their managers.
• cratermoon 5y ago
  Systems theory tells us that in large organizations nobody actually does what they say they do. For example, one person building a boat is a boat-builder. But nobody at General Dynamics Electric Boat can properly be said to be building boats (or ships). Thus, in a large organization, you can only improve the ability of individuals to do what they actually do, which may or may not improve the ability to the organization to accomplish its nominal purpose.
• pbreit 5y ago
  Humans are crazy.
• angarg12 5y ago
  The first half of the article is ok but the part about large organisations is completely misguided. I think the author is conflating prisoner's dilemma with the communication challenges in a large organisation, which arises naturally from their sheer size (as other's pointed out, these companies work in a bazillion products in parallel, not in a single one as the author claims). As an actual employee of one such company, one of the ways they reduce the impact of this is with Principal/Staff level engineers. This is similar to the concept of hero mentioned there. These high rank ICs oversee projects that span teams or orgs, and align them to achieve global positive outcomes.