4 ms·

Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to things being much slower than

Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to things being much slower than a startup. Some of them might be valid, but others are just the result of tragedy of large organisations (a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy). * Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work. * Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup). Since that is the only entity offering that product, their offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable. * Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power. This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some claps but won't do much for the org power). * The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing whatever needed to increase their power.

moneywoes 3y ago
May I ask what are these metrics
sealeck 3y ago
Having worked at some startups I think there are a lot of problems too - too many startups are founded by non-technical people. This almost inevitably ends in disaster, unless they have a technical co-founder with equal levels of decision and control - because invariably the money is not the founder's they aren't thinking of ways to save money. Some VC funds like a16z are partially to blame for this by telling the startups they invest in that sometimes it's a good idea to burn money in order to grab land, but the point where it doesn't make sense to spend more effort on efficiency is not one which a lot of startups reach. - a lot of the business models make zero sense, have zero testing performed on and no data gathered to attempt to validate. Just like you wouldn't build a train without some computer simulations and test models, and wouldn't launch it without test runs you shouldn't do the same for a startup
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
> a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy Underrated point. It didn't really sink in for me until I saw the numbers with my own eyes. From a quick DDG search of publicly available info, here's [1] the numbers for FAANG headcount as of the end of 2022: - Meta: 86,000 - Apple: 164,000 - Amazon: 1,541,000 - Netflix: 12,800 - Google: 190,000 The numbers get a bit smaller if you focus only on creative roles (engineering, design, etc) — but it's still an enormous amount of people. And all of them are constantly moving at the speed of realtime chat to jump on every project and figure out how they can use it to advance their careers. The politics and bureaucracy are practically inevitable at this scale. [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... (all companies' numbers slightly rounded for easy reading)
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys. If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years, but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I suspect it would still be pretty decent. A fun thought experiment, but I suspect they'd be bankrupt from the meritless lawsuits that come from being big, or in prison for not being able to follow laws they had to be big to lobby against. And even if not, the combined efforts of the scammers would probably evolve faster than two people could react.
    - ireadmevs 3y ago
      Since we are in fun thought experiment mode, here’s another one I just had: what if we somehow could prevent companies from getting too big? Would we manage to keep a line where they all stay more or less in “pretty decent” territory?
gowld 3y ago
Credit is free. I love getting work when all it costs is credit.
khazhoux 3y ago
> Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work. I've worked at a couple of top 5 tech companies, and it saddens me that people have such a sour/cynical view. You're saying that people don't move unless they get credit... but isn't it more likely that the people you need support from, are (1) already overloaded with work for other teams, (2) busy with their own core work, and (3) it's hard to keep plans aligned between very large number of teams, which then often makes "simple" requests difficult?
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  Unfortunately this has been my observation seeing internal deal making, and it becomes stronger the more higher level discussions I see. To take a hypothetical example, let's say a team owns some very simple central config store, and every now and then someone needs to get an entry added there. The speed of getting it added would so strongly depend on the favour you can do for them. A matter of adding a new key in a json file can take from hours to weeks depending on who asks. The idealists just lose out on promotions

moneywoes 3y ago

May I ask what are these metrics

sealeck 3y ago

Having worked at some startups I think there are a lot of problems too - too many startups are founded by non-technical people. This almost inevitably ends in disaster, unless they have a technical co-founder with equal levels of decision and control - because invariably the money is not the founder's they aren't thinking of ways to save money. Some VC funds like a16z are partially to blame for this by telling the startups they invest in that sometimes it's a good idea to burn money in order to grab land, but the point where it doesn't make sense to spend more effort on efficiency is not one which a lot of startups reach. - a lot of the business models make zero sense, have zero testing performed on and no data gathered to attempt to validate. Just like you wouldn't build a train without some computer simulations and test models, and wouldn't launch it without test runs you shouldn't do the same for a startup

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago

> a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy Underrated point. It didn't really sink in for me until I saw the numbers with my own eyes. From a quick DDG search of publicly available info, here's [1] the numbers for FAANG headcount as of the end of 2022: - Meta: 86,000 - Apple: 164,000 - Amazon: 1,541,000 - Netflix: 12,800 - Google: 190,000 The numbers get a bit smaller if you focus only on creative roles (engineering, design, etc) — but it's still an enormous amount of people. And all of them are constantly moving at the speed of realtime chat to jump on every project and figure out how they can use it to advance their careers. The politics and bureaucracy are practically inevitable at this scale. [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... (all companies' numbers slightly rounded for easy reading)

londons_explore 3y ago
Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys. If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years, but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I suspect it would still be pretty decent. A fun thought experiment, but I suspect they'd be bankrupt from the meritless lawsuits that come from being big, or in prison for not being able to follow laws they had to be big to lobby against. And even if not, the combined efforts of the scammers would probably evolve faster than two people could react.
  - ireadmevs 3y ago
    Since we are in fun thought experiment mode, here’s another one I just had: what if we somehow could prevent companies from getting too big? Would we manage to keep a line where they all stay more or less in “pretty decent” territory?

gowld 3y ago

Credit is free. I love getting work when all it costs is credit.

khazhoux 3y ago

> Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work. I've worked at a couple of top 5 tech companies, and it saddens me that people have such a sour/cynical view. You're saying that people don't move unless they get credit... but isn't it more likely that the people you need support from, are (1) already overloaded with work for other teams, (2) busy with their own core work, and (3) it's hard to keep plans aligned between very large number of teams, which then often makes "simple" requests difficult?

crop_rotation 3y ago
Unfortunately this has been my observation seeing internal deal making, and it becomes stronger the more higher level discussions I see. To take a hypothetical example, let's say a team owns some very simple central config store, and every now and then someone needs to get an entry added there. The speed of getting it added would so strongly depend on the favour you can do for them. A matter of adding a new key in a json file can take from hours to weeks depending on who asks. The idealists just lose out on promotions