4 ms·

Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an

Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.

breadwinner 1y ago
So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.
- mikert89 1y ago
  its risky for big companies to move quickly. They mostly want to maintain what they have. its a myth that they want to innovate daily
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    Increase the conversion rates a couple percent, decrease the turnover a couple percent, and pretty soon your talking about big money.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
  - nickff 1y ago
    I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.
  - fruitplants 1y ago
    > I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have... This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.
- eikenberry 1y ago
  Big companies 100% focus on maintaining their products/position, relying on acquisitions for innovation.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  A steady state calls for steady people. The concept applies everywhere. The most skilled painter of art is probably not the best person to paint your living room.
gxs 1y ago
I was hired as employee 500 and now we are at 5000 (numbers rounded to protect the innocent) It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process Some off the top of my head observations: You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
- Nevermark 1y ago
  > Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down Parallel friction: the more peers your work impacts, the more peers their are that can gatekeeper your work, for good and ill. Grows roughly: log P, where P is impacted peers. Serial friction: the more significant a change, the more management layers decision making has to pass up through, and every layer already has enough to do without considering significant changes. Can be very hard for a great idea to actually make it to someone who can say "yes", and for them to have the time. Grows roughly: S^2, IMHO, where S is layers of "too busy" management to be traversed to a potential "yes". That's the natural default. Some large organizations fight hard to keep the friction down, but it's going to be a fight. After many years of nimble progress, a company I worked with went through a phase transition, and I spent as many years and more, slowly sinking into quicksand. Before giving up on my own project and moving on.
nailer 1y ago
But Microsoft in 2000 to 2005 was still huge and had the best browser, OS, dev environment, smartphone, and messenger .

breadwinner 1y ago

So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.

mikert89 1y ago
its risky for big companies to move quickly. They mostly want to maintain what they have. its a myth that they want to innovate daily
- Nevermark 1y ago
  Increase the conversion rates a couple percent, decrease the turnover a couple percent, and pretty soon your talking about big money.
ryandrake 1y ago
I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
- nickff 1y ago
  I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.
- fruitplants 1y ago
  > I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have... This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.
eikenberry 1y ago
Big companies 100% focus on maintaining their products/position, relying on acquisitions for innovation.
Spooky23 1y ago
A steady state calls for steady people. The concept applies everywhere. The most skilled painter of art is probably not the best person to paint your living room.

gxs 1y ago

I was hired as employee 500 and now we are at 5000 (numbers rounded to protect the innocent) It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process Some off the top of my head observations: You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down

Nevermark 1y ago
> Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down Parallel friction: the more peers your work impacts, the more peers their are that can gatekeeper your work, for good and ill. Grows roughly: log P, where P is impacted peers. Serial friction: the more significant a change, the more management layers decision making has to pass up through, and every layer already has enough to do without considering significant changes. Can be very hard for a great idea to actually make it to someone who can say "yes", and for them to have the time. Grows roughly: S^2, IMHO, where S is layers of "too busy" management to be traversed to a potential "yes". That's the natural default. Some large organizations fight hard to keep the friction down, but it's going to be a fight. After many years of nimble progress, a company I worked with went through a phase transition, and I spent as many years and more, slowly sinking into quicksand. Before giving up on my own project and moving on.

nailer 1y ago

But Microsoft in 2000 to 2005 was still huge and had the best browser, OS, dev environment, smartphone, and messenger .