7 ms·

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

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.
      - WJW 5y ago
        Same loxodrome though.
      - lupire 5y ago
        But it's a constant steering angle, right? Just hold the wheel in place. (Of course in real life that wouldn't work so simply.)
  - lumost 5y ago
    There’s a quote attributed to adam smith “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation”. A large enterprise such as Google, GE, or IBM can be poorly managed for decades before being economically forced to change. I observed a team making 25 MM per engineer in a large company that made one change per year. There are products at google that require 400+ pages of documentation/proof to change.
    - lupire 5y ago
      > 400+ pages of documentation/proof to change. Like what?
  - wolfram74 5y ago
    I wasn't sure if there literally wasn't a great circle route that didn't include land in it. I am moderately surprised to find out there isn't[0]. But I would be more surprised if there wasn't some line of latitude you could follow around antartica that never hits land. [0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/30/143150/computer-scientists-have-found-the-longest-straight-line-you-could-sail-without-hitting/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/30/143150/computer-...
- heurisko 5y ago
  If the analogy is continued, it might also be harder to steer away from an iceberg.
  - spdionis 5y ago
    Which is probably an intended part of the analogy. On the other hand in these orgs you have people crying "iceberg!" all the time.
  - 83457 5y ago
    But they are so big and strong that there would be no danger from an iceber... oh
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    So many examples of this. Blockbuster vs NetFlix seems like one.
    - cestith 5y ago
      That wasn't necessarily inability to steer. Blockbuster had an opportunity to own Netflix at one point and said no. Just like Docker was given a chance to steward Kubernetes and decided to compete against it instead.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      Blockbuster v Netflix is odd though, in that Blockbuster actually did pivot to the DVD by mail subscriptions really well. Well at least operationally it was a good product, and imo better than Netflix's, but I have no idea if helped or hurt them financially. But Blockbuster's established sources for content/disks should have been an advantage against the stories of Netflix having to go buy retail copies of movies in cases of uncooperative distributors. It was just Phase 2 and moving to streaming where they fell so far behind. (Plus Redbox's uprising didn't help, which is a separate failure to pivot.)
- tapland 5y ago
  Until something big happens (Kodak?) But failing can be good and bad.
jaggederest 5y ago
I often talk about this when I do consulting work: the difference between succeeding accidentally and succeeding deliberately. (If they are not succeeding, they can't afford to hire a consultant, of course) It's my firm opinion that there is a U shaped curve of chaos - new companies do not yet know what they should be doing to make money, and large companies are inherently too complex for any one person (or subset of people) to actually understand what is happening. This is why I prefer to work with and for medium sized companies - companies that can have goals and metrics that lead to success, but are not yet so large that they are inherently unknowable.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I honestly wonder if it IS possible to know roughly how a company works and be able to make tactical improvements throughout. This is dismissed as micromanaging, and most people lack the curiosity necessary to accomplish it, but could a CEO/CTO actually have a good enough understanding to make changes throughout an organization and fix the dumb things that every employee knows but doesn’t have the authority to change? I suppose most executives and management spend a ton of time in meetings and not making such tactical decisions, but I do wonder if it is possible. I’m reminded of SpaceX, who is run by Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk. Gwynne keeps the whole business machine running and manages existing programs so well that Elon has the bandwidth to dig down to a fractal level and address a lot of the weird issues & bottlenecks that everyone knows about while leading new programs extremely fast. Or at least, that’s the story (doubtless the CEO meddling has negative effects, too, but overall seems to work at least as well as traditional organizations that big). Also, maybe that can only happen in a business like SpaceX which is filled with a bunch of fantastic workers who are just really driven to make things work at all levels.
  - cecilpl2 5y ago
    I too thought of SpaceX while reading your first paragraph. I've heard Elon Musk described as a "nanomanager".
    - someguydave 5y ago
Aeolun 5y ago
> That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction. And thereby deliberately push it into dysfunction. At least when seen by an impartial observer.
- cestith 5y ago
  The concerns of a business and the concerns of its engineering organization don't always align. On the one hand, you're maximizing for net income. On the other, you'd like to minimize the friction to make changes. The business organization needs to see value in allowing easy change and be convinced that the engineering org isn't going to quickly and easily kill their golden goose with that ability.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Killing their golden goose is kind of the point though. Obviously the people whose job is literally dealing with the bureaucracy are not going to like anyone making any moves towards making things more efficient.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
It's like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News. Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in "useless" beaurocracy. Why can't they just let me do it!? Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad. Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don't ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots. That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don't think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  What complaints about Wikipedia are you referring to? I post a lot on HN and I also edit Wikipedia. I don't recall any complaints of that kind.
  - photochemsyn 5y ago
    I block Wikipedia from all search results, mainly because so many links to sources are broken or paywalled. This is kind of ridiculous for an outfit that claims all information must be properly sourced and no 'original research' is allowed. It would seem fairly easy for Wikipedia to examine its own pages for broken links and flag any such link (and its related content) as unreliable. Wonder what that would look like...
- detaro 5y ago
  The main criticism of wikipedia here afaik is of "deletionism", and I don't think that framing fits for that - most people are completely happy if other people also get to make articles about their pet interests.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- someguydave 5y ago
  I want no idiots, not rules.
asdff 5y ago
>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. Sociologists have quantified these sorts of relationships almost a hundred years ago with graphical modelling.
- lupire 5y ago
  Sure, and economists too We have a Theory of the the Firm. But what are the results, in specific enough detail to drive individual business decisions?
ozim 5y ago
Then you get people nagging about how big companies are bad at security with leaks. It is easy to nag when they never had to secure anything or operate at scale of 100's of employees and 1000's of users. It is just hard even if you have good practices in place, because checking that everything is in place and training new people to follow rules is a lot of work.
- lupire 5y ago
  "It's hard" is a reason, not an excuse.
zcw100 5y ago
I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of months or so 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-...

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.
    - WJW 5y ago
      Same loxodrome though.
    - lupire 5y ago
      But it's a constant steering angle, right? Just hold the wheel in place. (Of course in real life that wouldn't work so simply.)
- lumost 5y ago
  There’s a quote attributed to adam smith “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation”. A large enterprise such as Google, GE, or IBM can be poorly managed for decades before being economically forced to change. I observed a team making 25 MM per engineer in a large company that made one change per year. There are products at google that require 400+ pages of documentation/proof to change.
  - lupire 5y ago
    > 400+ pages of documentation/proof to change. Like what?
- wolfram74 5y ago
  I wasn't sure if there literally wasn't a great circle route that didn't include land in it. I am moderately surprised to find out there isn't[0]. But I would be more surprised if there wasn't some line of latitude you could follow around antartica that never hits land. [0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/30/143150/computer-scientists-have-found-the-longest-straight-line-you-could-sail-without-hitting/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/30/143150/computer-...
heurisko 5y ago
If the analogy is continued, it might also be harder to steer away from an iceberg.
- spdionis 5y ago
  Which is probably an intended part of the analogy. On the other hand in these orgs you have people crying "iceberg!" all the time.
- 83457 5y ago
  But they are so big and strong that there would be no danger from an iceber... oh
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  So many examples of this. Blockbuster vs NetFlix seems like one.
  - cestith 5y ago
    That wasn't necessarily inability to steer. Blockbuster had an opportunity to own Netflix at one point and said no. Just like Docker was given a chance to steward Kubernetes and decided to compete against it instead.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Blockbuster v Netflix is odd though, in that Blockbuster actually did pivot to the DVD by mail subscriptions really well. Well at least operationally it was a good product, and imo better than Netflix's, but I have no idea if helped or hurt them financially. But Blockbuster's established sources for content/disks should have been an advantage against the stories of Netflix having to go buy retail copies of movies in cases of uncooperative distributors. It was just Phase 2 and moving to streaming where they fell so far behind. (Plus Redbox's uprising didn't help, which is a separate failure to pivot.)
tapland 5y ago
Until something big happens (Kodak?) But failing can be good and bad.

jaggederest 5y ago

I often talk about this when I do consulting work: the difference between succeeding accidentally and succeeding deliberately. (If they are not succeeding, they can't afford to hire a consultant, of course) It's my firm opinion that there is a U shaped curve of chaos - new companies do not yet know what they should be doing to make money, and large companies are inherently too complex for any one person (or subset of people) to actually understand what is happening. This is why I prefer to work with and for medium sized companies - companies that can have goals and metrics that lead to success, but are not yet so large that they are inherently unknowable.

Robotbeat 5y ago
I honestly wonder if it IS possible to know roughly how a company works and be able to make tactical improvements throughout. This is dismissed as micromanaging, and most people lack the curiosity necessary to accomplish it, but could a CEO/CTO actually have a good enough understanding to make changes throughout an organization and fix the dumb things that every employee knows but doesn’t have the authority to change? I suppose most executives and management spend a ton of time in meetings and not making such tactical decisions, but I do wonder if it is possible. I’m reminded of SpaceX, who is run by Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk. Gwynne keeps the whole business machine running and manages existing programs so well that Elon has the bandwidth to dig down to a fractal level and address a lot of the weird issues & bottlenecks that everyone knows about while leading new programs extremely fast. Or at least, that’s the story (doubtless the CEO meddling has negative effects, too, but overall seems to work at least as well as traditional organizations that big). Also, maybe that can only happen in a business like SpaceX which is filled with a bunch of fantastic workers who are just really driven to make things work at all levels.
- cecilpl2 5y ago
  I too thought of SpaceX while reading your first paragraph. I've heard Elon Musk described as a "nanomanager".
  - someguydave 5y ago

Aeolun 5y ago

> That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction. And thereby deliberately push it into dysfunction. At least when seen by an impartial observer.

cestith 5y ago
The concerns of a business and the concerns of its engineering organization don't always align. On the one hand, you're maximizing for net income. On the other, you'd like to minimize the friction to make changes. The business organization needs to see value in allowing easy change and be convinced that the engineering org isn't going to quickly and easily kill their golden goose with that ability.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Killing their golden goose is kind of the point though. Obviously the people whose job is literally dealing with the bureaucracy are not going to like anyone making any moves towards making things more efficient.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

It's like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News. Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in "useless" beaurocracy. Why can't they just let me do it!? Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad. Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don't ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots. That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don't think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.

Dumblydorr 5y ago
What complaints about Wikipedia are you referring to? I post a lot on HN and I also edit Wikipedia. I don't recall any complaints of that kind.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  I block Wikipedia from all search results, mainly because so many links to sources are broken or paywalled. This is kind of ridiculous for an outfit that claims all information must be properly sourced and no 'original research' is allowed. It would seem fairly easy for Wikipedia to examine its own pages for broken links and flag any such link (and its related content) as unreliable. Wonder what that would look like...
detaro 5y ago
The main criticism of wikipedia here afaik is of "deletionism", and I don't think that framing fits for that - most people are completely happy if other people also get to make articles about their pet interests.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
someguydave 5y ago
I want no idiots, not rules.

asdff 5y ago

>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. Sociologists have quantified these sorts of relationships almost a hundred years ago with graphical modelling.

lupire 5y ago
Sure, and economists too We have a Theory of the the Firm. But what are the results, in specific enough detail to drive individual business decisions?

ozim 5y ago

Then you get people nagging about how big companies are bad at security with leaks. It is easy to nag when they never had to secure anything or operate at scale of 100's of employees and 1000's of users. It is just hard even if you have good practices in place, because checking that everything is in place and training new people to follow rules is a lot of work.

lupire 5y ago
"It's hard" is a reason, not an excuse.

zcw100 5y ago

I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of months or so 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-...