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> I was at an effective startup that turned into an ineffective large organization before my own eyes Somewhat related, I've been in effective teams that turne

> I was at an effective startup that turned into an ineffective large organization before my own eyes Somewhat related, I've been in effective teams that turned into organizations, a couple of times. One of the main issues I've seen is that they're especially prone to survivorship bias, on both accounts of process and people. You get the usual "this is how we managed to get there, it must have been right, let's do more of it", and people get protective or suspicious if you propose anything else. There's also a tendency of over-attributing success to the people who happened to be here while the team/product became successful. They tend to be promoted to responsibilities, their voice is over-amplified and their opinion becomes dogma. The result is that rather than adapting to the turning point both organizationally and architecturally, you end up with dungeon keepers protecting their babies under the cover of "this is our culture". The growth is not painful and rather than re-thinking things from the ground up, we correct by patches and ad-hoc fixes - approvals, reviews, build queues, more planning, backlog sign-offs and such.

dcow 5y ago
> There's also a tendency of over-attributing success to the people who happened to be here while the team/product became successful. They tend to be promoted to responsibilities, their voice is over-amplified and their opinion becomes dogma. How do you fix this? Assume all success is pure luck and ban dogmatic things like style guides and code reviews and force entire rewrites of sowftware and infrastructure every few years so that best practices change and don't become dogmatic? One of the allures to getting in early somewhere is that you get to build the foundation and become the thought leader and define to an extent which dogmas shall be adhered to because you have the context to make those decisions. I'm sure it can get overbearing when abused, but I also think it's quite presumptuous to join a mid-stage startup thinking you're going to come in and uproot everything and make things happen your way. If that's what you want go make the sacrifice and join a small place and earn it. And grow the business with it. And then incorporate it into what you can bring to the table as an experienced industry professional so you can be hired as a director somewhere else when you're ready to move and do it at larger scale. IDK...

dcow 5y ago

> There's also a tendency of over-attributing success to the people who happened to be here while the team/product became successful. They tend to be promoted to responsibilities, their voice is over-amplified and their opinion becomes dogma. How do you fix this? Assume all success is pure luck and ban dogmatic things like style guides and code reviews and force entire rewrites of sowftware and infrastructure every few years so that best practices change and don't become dogmatic? One of the allures to getting in early somewhere is that you get to build the foundation and become the thought leader and define to an extent which dogmas shall be adhered to because you have the context to make those decisions. I'm sure it can get overbearing when abused, but I also think it's quite presumptuous to join a mid-stage startup thinking you're going to come in and uproot everything and make things happen your way. If that's what you want go make the sacrifice and join a small place and earn it. And grow the business with it. And then incorporate it into what you can bring to the table as an experienced industry professional so you can be hired as a director somewhere else when you're ready to move and do it at larger scale. IDK...