[HN Gopher] Why is everything so hard in a large organization? ___________________________________________________________________ Why is everything so hard in a large organization? Author : physicsgraph Score : 420 points Date : 2021-09-29 10:30 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (graphthinking.blogspot.com) (TXT) w3m dump (graphthinking.blogspot.com) | AdrianB1 wrote: | 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. | KineticLensman wrote: | 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. | Macha wrote: | 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. | KineticLensman wrote: | > 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. | | Yes. The last place I worked was a UK organisation that had | around 5000 staff, many of whom were software engineers. The | org was divided into 5 or so different divisions, each of | which had its own customers, sales teams, PMs, etc. | Crucially, each division had its own resourcing function, so | new projects could exploit local knowledge to find engineers | who had domain knowledge, and could even consider career | development opportunities when picking staff for new | bids/projects ('Fred is interested in trying this, he's not a | perfect fit but is competent and motivated to learn'). | | Anyway, a new CEO (who himself had an engineering background) | joined the organisation and apparently in an early meeting | asked 'how many engineers do we have across the company?'. | Nobody actually knew. So after a while he started an | initiative to launch a company wide resource management | process. Although well intentioned, it was a disaster. We | ended up with global resource managers who didn't actually | know any of the people concerned. A lot of our work was | specialised engineering (e.g. simulation development, signal | processing, etc) and it proved impossible to develop a global | skills framework with all of the right categories. After a | very painful year, bid teams and projects reverted to local | resourcing to find the staff who had relevant skills and | domain knowledge. | | I'm not against standardizing things across organisations | (indeed, my main function was trying to drive technical | commonality) but like optimization, you have to choose the | right things to standardize, and the right things to leave | untouched. | Agentlien wrote: | 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. | tyingq wrote: | 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. | dreen wrote: | 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. | JohnBooty wrote: | As an in-the-trenches developer, I've almost never been able to | get a productivity initiative such as this into effect. | | The obvious answer is, "it's my fault" and that's highly | possible. | | However, I never really see anybody else accomplishing such | things either. | mewpmewp2 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | jon-wood wrote: | That's why notes are then distributed for review, allowing | people to say when the notes as taken don't accurately | reflect what was discussed. | NikolaNovak wrote: | It's not appearances or self consciousness. Have you | actually asked people and tried to deeply understand why | they don't like it? | | It's difference between freely brainstorming with | colleagues, and speaking on the formal record that anybody | can access at any time under any context or lack thereof | for any purpose and with full attribution. No more jokes, | informal chit chat, putting out there ideas, or sticking | your neck out etc. And linking it to features sounds like a | great way to fingerpoint, scapegoat and blame :-( | | It's all theoretical and unlikely and paranoid until it | inevitably happens :-/ | | (fwiw, after 20+ years in the field, I am not consenting to | recording; and if I do, you'll get the appropriately | shortest most formal safest contribution imaginable. Only | the things I would be comfortable preceding with "it is the | formal position of the company / team to...". Feel free to | judge, until or unless you experience or witness the | downfall that can be of sufficient magnitude to eliminate | all upside of recording :) | Graffur wrote: | Hard disagree. Why would I consent to be recorded in the | workplace? My job isn't to be recorded. | nvarsj wrote: | Meeting recordings have terrible signal to noise ratio. Instead | of putting effort into creating a concise document to describe | the meeting output and actions to take, the burden is placed on | others to shift through an hour video. I also see it used as a | CYA technique: "oh but we recorded this decision, it's your | fault for not watching hours of our meeting videos to know | this". | bachmeier wrote: | 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 wrote: | I disagree -- my experience is that most of them care quite a | bit. | avereveard wrote: | > 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 wrote: | 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. | aazaa wrote: | > 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-... | | The idea is based on the axiom that "organizations don't suffer | pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs." | cousin_it wrote: | 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. | zz865 wrote: | Missing is fraud, auditors, regulators, lawsuits etc which seem | to rule big orgs and small companies largely ignore. | larsrc wrote: | 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. | datavirtue wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | twobitshifter wrote: | 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. | nopassrecover wrote: | I'm not going to say it's the same, but I have a bit of a story | here. | | My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of | high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop | competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing | as well as games. | | The owner's approach was to employ a series of teenagers who | saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive "foot in the | door" first job experience despite being paid less than half | minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not | to envy today's junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, | yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there's | something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working | your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early | modern web). | | Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and | keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, | boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, | cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any | formal education, with tools that don't match today (no | especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just | catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without | an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view | rivalled Amazon's UX at the time (we developed some novel ways | to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed | Amazon in this space). | | On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms | POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and | ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, | automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series | of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock | availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 | suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping | custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case | pulling CSV email attachments). | | The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could | effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a | better experience. | | This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a | comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal | inventory, automatically take customer orders, place | corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that | point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, | with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping | timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, | administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic | updates to customers. | | We just got stuff done because we didn't know any better. | | I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, | eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller | accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT | educated engineers. | | Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power | of having bespoke software supporting your core business | operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of | reinventing the wheel. | bradstewart wrote: | > We just got stuff done because we didn't know any better. | | Despite knowing I'm more effective at avoiding major | pitfalls, guiding the team in the right direction, building | software that lasts.... I miss this feeling, so much. | lbriner wrote: | Sounds like a startup but then what happens? You start | getting success so now you have a new salesperson but they | need lots of help because they aren't as techie as you. You | might even start needing 24 hour support and a dedicated | returns line. | | You then realise that you are the main part of the success so | you now want your own office and a team to manage. Of course, | they are not as sharp as you so you have lost your skill in | return for trying to train and manage them - some don't even | really want to be there. | | Then the boss decides to get an investor to help scale the | business - you need the support people on-board before you | can start charging for support - and that person is now | putting you under pressure because you are not updating the | website quickly enough, there are bugs that people are | complaining about etc. | | It's a fairly classic story. You either stick, fold or go | FANG! | jermaustin1 wrote: | My first software job was also right out of high school in | June of 2006. | | I was recruited by a small consulting firm that had a | specific project in mind that aligned with a fake project I | had on a resume. My resume was fake because there was a BCIS | project in high school to create a resume and post it, but I | forgot to take it down, but I didn't let them know that | either. | | I bluffed my way passed two interviews, was given a $30k | salary and benefits. Within a month I was running the team, | and within 6 months I had shipped my first product (an ocean | shipping contract management system). This is after they had | been trying to write this software for over 6 years with no | success. | | The company then decided that I was worth more than the rest | of the team, took me into a meeting told me that I would be | getting more responsibilities, and asked if I cared if they | laid off the rest of the team. I agreed with them thinking | that by laying them off I'd get a big raise... I did not, I | just got longer hours and even some weekend work! | | So after a month of that exploitation, I quit to focus on a | couple of side projects that were almost making enough money | for me since I still lived with my parents. | | First jobs (especially in "industry")as an undereducated 18 | year old kid are crazy exploitative. I didn't know the | difference between salary and hourly, or the fact that salary | means you work as long as we want you for the same pay as if | you didn't work at all. | netcan wrote: | I agree with you on amazon, but I think the author _does_ have | a point. | | Take FB as an example. FB have 60k employees, 12X the 2012 IPO | number. It also costs 12X to run facebook today. They don't do | _that_ much more today than in 2012. They mostly just do things | a more complicated way. | | IMO, the reason for that is actually revenue. Beyond a point, | there's no market discipline reason for mitigating costs. FB is | profitable enough with its >30% margins. Investors don't want | them to cut the salary bill. They want FB to hire people, | invest, do more stuff & grow. | | If FB revenues had plateaued around $10bn, I'm pretty sure FB | would still exist. FB would have 90% fewer employees and users | would not experience much difference. | | Once you have all these extra people, and basically the same | set of tasks at hand... sluggish ways of doing things and | inefficiency are basically guaranteed. If 500 devs are now | working on an area that 50 people previously ran, it's going to | look like ineffectiveness at the ground level. | | A lot of the software industry is like that. Half the industry, | like most internal dev orgs are not very capable or motivated, | and things look sluggish at ground level. The other half is | flooded with cash and great devs, but teams are bigger than | actually necessary. | kleinsch wrote: | Not a great example. FB's product surface is easily 10x 2012. | If you think FB == news feed, go dig into the app. | Marketplace didn't exist in 2012, for example. Also, IG | acquisition was in 2012 post-IPO, WhatsApp and Oculus were | after that. | netcan wrote: | Possibly. I've had this conversation a few times and I find | it mostly unresolveable. | | There's no useful measure of FB's efficiency, what 10X more | FB means... so we can't externally measure the claim. | Whether or not someone agrees with me or you probably | relates to what we think about work & efficiency broadly. | kleinsch wrote: | I think there are two parts, one which is resolvable and | one which isn't. | | FB doesn't "do that much more today than in 2012" - | completely resolvable. I hear statements like this all | the time. FB/Google/Amazon don't do more, they just do it | bigger, or they just hire engs to keep them from the | competition, etc. FB had 3000 employees total at IPO. I | can easily name 10 brand new things launched/acquired | since IPO that each have a massive user base and at least | 1000 engineers on them now. I'm sure people could do the | same for Google, Amazon, Apple. | | The unresolvable part - are the 60K employees at FB today | individually doing as much as the 3K employees were at | IPO? Personally, I doubt it. The luxury of being big | means you can try more ambitious stuff that may never | launch, overbuild on infra and process, etc. The flipside | is that niche features you've never heard of can drive | millions in revenue bc of the scale of the userbase and | business customers. | netcan wrote: | I disagree... " _10 brand new things launched /acquired_" | is not a measurable quantity. You _could_ tally up the | employees that worked at these companies pre | acquisition... but to total is a lot bigger. | | There's also the fact that in software, you have | something once you build it. Software is cumulative, so | you'd expect it to grow as long as _someone_ is working | on it. | | There are various points of evidence, but they're all | arguable. | joshuamorton wrote: | I mean there's also like the super not obvious stuff that | comes with scale. Facebook wanted to hire me to join | their team that does supply chain optimization to ensure | that computers get to their datacenters fast enough. | That's like a reasonable thing for them to have but it's | totally removed from the product. | netcan wrote: | Good point, but is " _supply chain optimization to ensure | that computers get to their datacenters fast_ " a task | that is not required at 2012 FB-scale, or is it an | optimisation that FB just didn't have the scale for in | 2012. | | The former implies inefficiencies of scale. The latter | implies efficiencies. I think both exist. | wintermutestwin wrote: | And yet Marketplace has amazingly poor UX and only has | traction because it fills a niche of classifieds with RL | identity. | | To the larger points here, this illustrates another major | failing of large organizations that achieve de facto | monopoly status due to network effect: arrogance towards | the users that made them so large in the first place. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | > They don't do that much more today than in 2012 | | Just to note, often sales will scale linearly with revenue, | and certainly most well-run companies will match revenue to | headcount growth. | | But yeah, it's certainly possible that FB could be run much | leaner, but then they'd be getting _even more_ flack from | governments /NGO's/hacker news etc. | ProblemFactory wrote: | > Take FB as an example. FB have 60k employees, 12X the 2012 | IPO number. It also costs 12X to run facebook today. They | don't do that much more today than in 2012. | | They do. | | In 2012, their advertising revenue was $5B. In 2020, it was | $86B. They are "doing" 17x more now. | | I don't mean that from your perspective of revenue leading to | wasteful spending, but from an _advertising product_ | perspective. If you 're making $86B in advertising revenue, | then every junior data scientist whose entire job might be to | optimise ad click-throughs for cat food in Mongolia by 3% is | a net win for the company. If they are getting better at cat | food ads, they are doing more. | netcan wrote: | More revenue, yes. | | That was my point. Revenue rises, and everything else grows | with it regardless of need. | | Whether or not the marginal junior data scientist is a net | win for the company.... I suspect not at a company like FB. | Efficiency is hard. Factories are efficient because margins | are slim and capital costs are high. FB is the opposite. | There's no external disciplinarian forcing managers to find | ways of minimizing junior data scientist headcount. | | FB profit margin this year is 37%. When margins are that | high, there's not much incentive to cut fat. If profit | margin is 3%, a 1% efficiency gain is a major win. At | 37%... different game. | Dumblydorr wrote: | My question: what is new about what FB is doing currently? | Are they attempting to maintain their current influence and | social network? Stem the tide of anti social media talk? | Encourage controversial misinformation? What do they need the | employees for? Is it to improve their image for investors? | netcan wrote: | >> what is new about what FB is doing currently? | | You'd find the same sort of answers at FB that you'd find | at citibank. They have regulatory challenges, content | moderation challenges. Corporate structure challenges left | over from acquisitions or whatnot. | | I'm sure there are a ton of items on the todo/doing/done | lists. There are "new and exciting" projects, oculus VR, | whatever is happening with the marketplace, etc. | | Same thing at citibank. From the perspective of a manager | there, I imagine it looks like they're doing a ton of stuff | all the time. | jldugger wrote: | Well, 13 people worked on Instagram when FB acquired it for a | billion. So... productivity varies. | jasode wrote: | _> 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 wrote: | 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. | lbriner wrote: | This is probably due to engineer's bias. We like to look at | something like Amazon and think "I could build that". It's just | a shopping site? | | A business person would know all of the things you are talking | about that make that e-commerce site as successful as it is. | | I have stumbled across many existing companies that do things | that I have thought about developing but they employ 2 people, | have no marketing and no-one knows about them. | | That said, I also agree that there is a weird exponential | growth of team size with a product that isn't always much | bigger. Our SaaS company turns over about 3M/year with a dev | team of 6. I was looking at another similar company the other | day (granted slightly bigger/more complicated but only 2 main | products) and they had about 200 devs in their about page! | planb wrote: | 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. | hunter-gatherer wrote: | > ...that even the simplest tasks contain when rolled out to | millions of people. | | Wasn't this precisely the focus of the article? | planb wrote: | Maybe I misread it, but I understood that the article said | that the simplest tasks get complex when dozens of people | are involved in solving it. I'm not saying that's wrong, of | course working with a large team creates overhead. But | giving the headcount of amazon and google as evidence for | this is a bit misleading. | handoflixue wrote: | > Wasn't this precisely the focus of the article? | | "A software developer could write a proof-of-concept search | engine in a few days; Alphabet employs 130,000 people " | | This suggests that those 130,000 people are all software | developers, and that they all work on the search engine. I | think clarifying that ambiguity is a pretty appropriate | response. | | The reason Alphabet employees 130K people isn't because | "running a search engine at scale" requires it, it's | because they're in 30 other lines of business. | freewilly1040 wrote: | I wouldn't really listen to the case on either FB or Twitter | unless the person arguing the point is familiar with using | the products as an advertiser. That is the core product, | after all. | fouric wrote: | > Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer | could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. | | The article does not claim that. You misread it. Right there, | in the quote you included: | | > A software developer could write a _simple_ e-commerce | website in a few days; Amazon employs 1,335,000 people | | It says "simple" right in the middle. Then it immediately says | afterward that Amazon employs 1.3M people, which clearly | indicates that the author does _not_ consider Amazon to be | "simple" (and this holds regardless of whether the 1.3M people | are factually related to e-commerce), and that he does not | expect his readers to, either. | twobitshifter wrote: | The author is trying to use Amazon's workforce size to | support his argument that | | "given their organization's internal objectives, they are | forced to build huge workforces to accomplish what seems like | "simple" tasks." | | "internal objectives" is not why Amazon needs 1.4 million | people to complete the "simple" task described. And if you | redefine internal objectives to include everything else that | Amazon does to make money then it's really saying nothing at | all. | [deleted] | lbriner wrote: | 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? | tomcart wrote: | 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-gov... | throwmamatrain wrote: | 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-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! | [deleted] | quantum_state wrote: | Based on my observations, suboptimal incentive policy leads to | entropy barriers ... overcoming entropy barriers requires time | and effort if at all possible ... | dorianmariefr wrote: | Doesn't have to be, depends on the organization | cascom wrote: | 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) | jrochkind1 wrote: | 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. | jeffbee wrote: | 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. | doctor_eval wrote: | 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. | lightbendover wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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?" | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Everyone sees that the check could have saved them that one | time. Nobody sees the cost of the check, applied over and | over and over... | Jensson wrote: | The real answer is typically "These rules is why I have my | job, I can't remove them since I want to stay". It is like | when you automate 90% of someone's job they usually don't get | happy. This is the same thing but the opposite, bureaucrats | de-automate tasks to create new jobs. | NikolaNovak wrote: | The terrifying part for me,is that by now I've been on _both_ | sides of that conversation multiple times - and the | third,less seen side, where the paying client explicitly and | specifically asks and expects you to implement such a Process | as part of "lessons learned". | | It's noble to say "ouch! well let's make sure we don't do | THAT again!", but yeah ; over time the processes and | procedures do expand ad infinitum :-/ | ekimekim wrote: | > expects you to implement such a Process as part of | "lessons learned". | | I sometimes refer to this as "scar tissue" - an over- | response to a trauma that causes ongoing issues more so | than the initial injury. | andi999 wrote: | One shd also consider that the process is often the only | thing which really holds large megacorps together, there is | nothing else. You could have a turnover of all staff, as long | as you keep the process it is still the same megacorp. That's | probably the reason management often says 'process over | results' because it is the heart of the company. | PeterisP wrote: | Looking back at a megacorp experience, I could read most of | your exact text but replacing the Bob's mistake with Bob's | intentional fraud - and then the process does start making | sense. People _do_ make mistakes on purpose; sure, a small | minority of people, but in a large organization that will be | multiple cases every year. | Aeolun wrote: | Does that justify wasting hours upon hours of every | employees time per year? Somehow businesses do not look at | this kind of thing as 'a cost of doing business'. | netjiro wrote: | It really does not. Conservative sketch: assume 10k ppl, | avg cost $50k/y, process/procedure/policy overhead 30%, | is 150M/y. For that to make sense you'd need 15x $10M | fraudulent or single point stupidity errors per year. And | that is assuming that the bullshit actually catches most | errors. | | In my experience the 30% is conservative, from my | measurements of large orgs. High overhead does not reduce | errors, instead it increases both frequency and severity. | It also kills innovation, thinking, adaptability, etc. | jiggawatts wrote: | This pales in comparison to the tender process required | of government. The logic goes something like this: | | Before: In the past, companies would bribe bureaucrats in | order to land sweetheart deals. There was not enough | competition and hence the government was paying too much. | | After: There is now a 10% chance of landing a contract | after a month of paperwork. Only Accenture, Deloitte, and | a handful of their direct competitors can afford to risk | the time and effort required to win a contract. They | don't actually do anything, they just subcontract | everything while _skimming their cut off the top_. This | isn 't corruption however, it's just a nice legal | business transaction. | | I regularly see projects that might take 1 guy 6 months | balloon out to 20+ people for multiple years across three | orgs and costing tens of millions of dollars, all in the | name of "avoiding corruption". | | The best part is that _because_ the projects end up | costing so much, they have to be "taken more seriously", | which means that the tender process must be "thorough", | which means _more_ papework and _more_ managers and paper | pushers on both sides of the fence. | | There's an exponential cost to this a bit like the rocket | equation... | Aeolun wrote: | The stupid thing is that the reverse also happens. I happen | to have a random conversation with a business member that is | complaining about something ridiculously simple in our | system, and that it's been in the pipeline to fix for months. | | My mind boggles, since it's literally a 5 minute fix, and | somewhere over our head some managers have been protecting | their little fiefdoms at the expense of this poor guy that | does something stupid by hand for an hour every day. | | 5 minutes later the fix is deployed, and we just saved 200 | hours per year of pointless labor. | refurb wrote: | One problem I've seen is someone implements a process, a | really nice process, but has zero clue how it fits into the | big picture. It's clearly designed as if it's the only | process someone needs to complete. | | What you end up with is a half dozen "really nice processes" | all stacked up and suddenly what took 1 week now takes 4-6 | weeks to complete. | | Each process is justifiable on its own but put together make | no sense at all. | impjohn wrote: | Reminds me of that anectode where the father would ask the | son to take the clay pots and go fetch water from the | fountain. He would yell at the son to not break the pots and | slap him. When people asked why he punished the son before | even going, he said: "What's the point of punishment after he | breaks the pots?" | yamrzou wrote: | Because adding more engineers to a project increases | communication overhead. | | Obligatory Tweet: | https://twitter.com/RichRogers_/status/1159872097205805056 | cable2600 wrote: | Politics, favoritism, nepotism, incompetence, and working synergy | with a team also spoils things because you never get synergy. | qznc wrote: | You describe the symptoms. The article goes deeper. | fidesomnes wrote: | They unironically used the word synergy, they are clearly a | part of the problem. | Jensson wrote: | 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 wrote: | It isn't a prisoner's dilemma because there isn't an upside | to the individuals if everyone cooperates | andyferris wrote: | Tragedy of the commons is a multi-party prisonner's | dilemma, right? | Jensson wrote: | 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. | alfl wrote: | 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. | Ocerge wrote: | 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. | datavirtue wrote: | 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 wrote: | Ha! Thanks, in my journey through enterprise (that was very | similar to yours) I learned a lot about diplomacy :) | motohagiography wrote: | 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. | bjornsing wrote: | You can dress it up in game theory, but it basically comes down | to this thing we call... politics. | funOtter wrote: | Once an organization gets large enough, the different divisions | start competing with each other, essentially making several | "smaller companies" within the large organization. | bwestergard wrote: | 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. | amosj wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | bantunes wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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...). | brightball wrote: | Communication multiples due to the number of people involved. | nemo44x wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | didip wrote: | 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. | vannevar wrote: | 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. | someothertime wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | ericalexander0 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | wombatpm wrote: | 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 wrote: | Very good example. They did everything wrong, got looted | along the way, and still took more than two decades to | finally die. | leokennis wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | netcan wrote: | 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. | bjornsing wrote: | > Human cooperation in groups to achieve aims is basically the | secret sauce of human civilization, culture & what makes us | different from other animals. | | I don't know... Albert Einstein alone makes us pretty different | from other animals. | netcan wrote: | Albert Einstein wasn't alone. He was engaged with a | scientific community, through papers, publications and such. | He used maths developed by others. The scientific method | actually calls for multiple people, even if only for | objective POVs. | | Even though he wasn't on a team, that still _is_ a model of | communication. We call that model science. | | The scientific revolution was largely a revolution in the way | scientists were organised. They became connected to one | another via publication, critical dialogue and such. The | scientific method is, among other things a model of | cooperation. How to replicate, publish, review and convince | one another of things. | nunb wrote: | The Coasians sentence seems to have run away after "Coasians | ran around" ! Or did you mean "ran aground" ? | netcan wrote: | ..ran around explaining how everything could be understood as | transaction costs at work, in much the same way neoclassicals | thought their marginal price dynamics explained everything. | | oops | crdrost wrote: | > 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? | oceanplexian wrote: | I think the evolution of organizations is super interesting | stuff. But I would say that a lot of the paradigms that have | been true for Millenia have changed rapidly in the last few | decades, which is an extremely short period of time in the | history of our social evolution. For example: | | (1) 100 years ago we didn't have reliable instant | communication. If you wanted to send a message across oceans | it could take days or weeks. As a result having a "chain of | command" was critically important to survival. For example a | military commander prior to the 20th century could not make | decisions regarding an army thousands of miles away, and thus | needed to delegate decision making authority. In 2021 a | military commander (Or leader) can instantly make a decision | from thousands of miles away. Or perhaps a computer could | make those decisions instead. | | (2) Data-driven decision making the name of the game in most | large corporations. The dinosaurs are still making decisions | based on reports every week/month/quarter. The most cutting | edge organizations are operating on a different level. For | example, if a particular product or service isn't performing | at a certain price, you don't need a bureaucracy to optimize | it. Automated software could easily A/B test pricing schemes | in different regions, and come up with the most optimized | conclusions, all without any humans in the loop. Ride-share | software and food delivery apps are already ahead of the | curve here, and like it or not, this outsources a lot of | people in the business of decision making. | | Not to go too far down a rabbit hole, but I think that | "bureaucracy ... as a gene for a successful organization" may | be a gene that soon goes extinct. Computers, data, and | software can do bureaucracy much better than humans can. And | if the trend continues we may see the entire structure of | organizations, leadership, and decision making make a | complete shift from what we even expect an organization to | be, possibly closer to resembling cybernetic organism rather | than a government or traditional corporate leadership | structure. | netcan wrote: | I'm not _sure_ that I understand the point correctly, but if | I do... | | One of the point Dawkins' used his original meme concept to | demonstrate is that a meme may not be beneficial to the | person or culture carrying it. The meme just needs to persist | and reproduce. He is the selfish gene guy, after all. | | Also I agree that cultures evolve, but I think the analogy to | natural evolution by natural selection can be overstretched. | This dynamic exists and can even be dominant, but there are | other evolutionary dynamic going on. | | For myself, my "Big Theory of Bureaucracy" is simply that it | accumulates over time. The larger the scale, the less | competition and creative destruction happen so bureaucracy | can keep growing undisturbed. | | You could analogise corporate bureaucracy to just about any | traditional culture: the US senate, the catholic church or | some small island tribe. | | The US senate does this ritual around debt ceilings. There | are written and unwritten rules that make no sense from the | outside. It's all based on a rule from 100 years ago, and | stopped serving its initial purpose generations ago. | Meanwhile, the whole process has gained incidental important | roles in coalition consolidation & legislation bundling. | Those now depend on debt ceilings. It can be resolved either | by vote or a ceremony whereby a small metal object is place | inside a large building. The whole thing requires a lot of | paperwork. | | 50 years from now "debt ceiling" might refer exclusively to a | quaint ritual where a president gives some guy with a special | hat a special coin. At this point, it's impossible to tell | bureaucracy from ritual. It's just stuff that needs doing in | very specific ways for reasons that are not externally | logical. They have history, dependencies, tradition, etc. | | Maybe bureaucracy is just an inelegant version of that. | shadowtree wrote: | Dependency management. | | Why is everything so hard in a large code base? | | Same reason. | black_13 wrote: | 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. | shoto_io wrote: | 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 wrote: | Given their recent moves you could argue they're still learning | like the rest of us. | [deleted] | darepublic wrote: | 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. | agumonkey wrote: | 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 wrote: | The field is called Organizational Behavior if you're looking | for scholarly info | agumonkey wrote: | godly many welcomes :) | spaetzleesser wrote: | 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. | tehjoker wrote: | 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. | unnah wrote: | 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. | achenatx wrote: | 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. | papito wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | papito wrote: | 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? | lordnacho wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | There are no courses that don't eventually intersect with | land, or other ships... | lumost wrote: | 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. | wolfram74 wrote: | 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/compu | ter-... | WJW wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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 wrote: | Same loxodrome though. | heurisko wrote: | If the analogy is continued, it might also be harder to steer | away from an iceberg. | michaelcampbell wrote: | So many examples of this. Blockbuster vs NetFlix seems like | one. | beerandt wrote: | 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.) | cestith wrote: | 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. | spdionis wrote: | 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 wrote: | But they are so big and strong that there would be no | danger from an iceber... oh | tapland wrote: | Until something big happens (Kodak?) | | But failing can be good and bad. | Aeolun wrote: | > 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | jaggederest wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | phaedrus wrote: | This is similar to the premise behind my "software | archeology" tool idea. While working as a lowly developer | at a medium-large company, I kept finding case after case | where badly coded software was doing dumb/wasteful things, | but I lacked the authority to fix problems from a systems | perspective. | | I fantasized about what if there were some kind of internal | company web app, a portal or dashboard, where people at the | highest levels, if they cared (I am not even if sure they | did), could drill down to a "fractal level" (as you called | it) and see what the software is actually coded to do, | presented in a way that makes sense to a non- | programmer/higher-level understanding. | | The elevator pitch for this kind of IT product would be: | "Software runs your business, and you don't know how it | works." | | Unfortunately I never could figure out how to actually turn | this into a real thing. None of the common approximations | of software (modeling) do a very good job of capturing | subtle aspects _or_ of being more understandable than the | code itself. The one conclusion I did come to is that it | would have to be something where low level developers | interpret and model the code to digest it for whatever | format the portal uses, and not some kind of automated | distillation or analysis of the code. | CPLX wrote: | This is a genuinely great idea. | | I think it might in fact be impossible but if you ever | figure it out you'll win all the marbles. | bonoboTP wrote: | When you get down to it, many apparently "dumb" things are | about power and status and political arm wrestling and | compromise among departments. | cecilpl2 wrote: | I too thought of SpaceX while reading your first paragraph. | I've heard Elon Musk described as a "nanomanager". | someguydave wrote: | I bet he plays the "bring me a rock" game with all of his | reports. | Robotbeat wrote: | Really? Is that an argument for "bring me a rock" being a | successful strategy? | | SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vs Vulcan and New Glenn | and Ariane 6. | | SpaceX Starlink vs OneWeb. | | SpaceX Dragon Crew vs Boeing Starliner. | | SpaceX Starship HLS vs Blue Origin HLS. | ghostpepper wrote: | What game is this? I'm not familiar with it | johngalt wrote: | https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/2002/01/volume- | 5-n... | apohn wrote: | >This is why I prefer to work with and for medium sized | companies | | Out of curiosity, how do you define a medium sized company? | How many people, how much revenue, etc? The way people define | this varies widely, so just trying to understand how you | define it. | jaggederest wrote: | More people than it is feasible to get into one meeting at | a time :) I usually am thinking of 20+ to <200 people - | probably my sweet spot is around 50-75, but it depends a | lot on the people at the company. Basically the size where | they start wanting to have things figured out, instead of | just being amazed they work at all. | | In startup terms? Private companies, usually post Series A | (usually B or C) but not yet private equity unicorn rounds. | In market cap terms it's 100m+ to <2b or ARR ~2m to ~25m | for a sass-style company. still a "small cap" in the grand | scheme of things. | apohn wrote: | Thanks! I think with all the well known tech behemoths | (50K+ employees), it's easy to lose perspective and | assume that a company like Databricks (2K+ employees) or | Stripe (4K+ employees) is a medium sized company in | comparison. I appreciate the clarification. | gowld wrote: | This is the moderation fallacy, assuming that the middle is | better than the extremes and not just as likely to be the | worst of both worlds. | | Even if the optimum is somewhere in the middle, the middle | region is a spectrum and the part you picked might be worse | than the ends. (Picture a sine-wave shaped graph of quality | vs size.) | conductr wrote: | I find medium sized companies more frustrating. IMO, they are | trying to become large companies and do things that are | status quo expectations of large orgs. Yet, without realizing | the ways in which those things have constrained you from | moving as quickly as they are or did when smaller. It's like | adding a bunch of rigidity to the process and then asking why | the flexibility has been reduced. | | Feedback loops of communication is what I view as the biggest | inefficiency. If you CC 10 people on an email, you'll still | be chasing 3 of them for a response next week. | ZeroGravitas wrote: | 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. | closeparen wrote: | The solution for that is review by a smart person who is | empowered to consider the context and use her professional | judgement, not a static set of criteria. | photochemsyn wrote: | Unfortunately, a 'smart person' in the employ of one | industry might not agree with a 'smart person' in the | employ of another industry. | | For example, consider two smart Wikipedia editors working | on the climate change and global warming pages... one from | the fossil fuel sector, one from the renewable energy | sector. | closeparen wrote: | The sensibilities of your gatekeepers are your | organization's culture. If you don't like them, you have | a deeper problem which rules aren't going to fix. | im3w1l wrote: | Wikipedia doesn't have an idiot problem. It has a smart | people with an agenda problem. | thaumasiotes wrote: | It also has an idiot problem. The idiots are there, and you | will occasionally run into them. I've found pages in the | course of natural browsing which were suffering from both | obvious and very subtle vandalism. | Dumblydorr wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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] | someguydave wrote: | I want no idiots, not rules. | avidiax wrote: | The trouble is that even if everyone has great ideas, | implementing all of them at once is idiotic. | | You need some brakes on the organization to assure that the | rate of change is manageable and that marginal ideas are | implemented more slowly if at all. | sokoloff wrote: | If it's better to slow down the good and the bad ideas, | red tape, organizational brakes, and a "default nope" | culture are great. | | It might also be better to have a much faster pace and | more freewheeling "default don't care; if you can make it | work, it'll stay" which also then requires a relatively | ruthless culling mechanism (even if slightly unfair) for | the things that don't work. | CPLX wrote: | I'm fucking brilliant, I'm literally the opposite of an | idiot. I swear. | | Ask me to navigate a bus station in a provincial Chinese | city and I'm a complete fucking moron though. Ask me how I | know. | | Point being, there's no such thing as idiocy without | context. | dgb23 wrote: | Idiots is a bad term for this. Novices need rules before | they are competent. After a certain level of expertise you | start breaking the rules, develop your own specialized | style, because you know when to break them and how to make | up new ones. And we're all novices in some contexts, very | rarely anything above that. | | The problem is not rules/"idiots"/novices. The problem is | when people who make/enforce the rules are not fit to do | so, cling to the rules and apply them with sweeping | generality. The people who create those problems are | typically incompetent but eager or even zealous at the same | time. | | They are resistant to learning, addicted to power and/or | afraid of change and certainly afraid of appearing | incompetent. So they never get past that level where they | start to recognize when rules need to change or need to get | broken. | surajrmal wrote: | It's not just novices. Humans are just error prone and | make mistakes. Processes to help prevent those mistakes | from making material impact on the business are critical | to making it sustainable. Honestly though, these | processes, if done well can improve velocity of the | organization. For example having a comprehensive set of | precommit tests may enable your team to continuously ship | from head every day. An alternative process to achieve | the same effect may only allow shipping once every 3 | months. This sort of thing applies to non-technical | processes as well. | qznc wrote: | It's not just errors. There is the effect of bounded | rationality: The organization is too complex to consider | everything, so intelligent people make decisions which | have unintended bad effects. | elpatoisthebest wrote: | We are all somewhere on the idiot scale. | SonicScrub wrote: | Not only that, but we have multiple on differing levels | of the idiot scale depending on the topic at hand. The | biggest idiots I've encountered are brilliant people | outside their knowledge domain. | andrekandre wrote: | > we have multiple on differing levels of the idiot | scale depending on the topic at hand | | or even depending on the time of day, or current | stress/work levels | | alot of things can affect the idiot scale... | Bootvis wrote: | The other way around I hope ;) | SonicScrub wrote: | *The biggest idiots I've encountered are brilliant people | within their knowledge domain. | | Exhibit A: me writing ;p | foldr wrote: | Don't worry :) I read it as "The biggest idiots I've | encountered are brilliant people (who are [idiots when | they are]) outside their knowledge domain." | v-erne wrote: | That's very narrow way of thinking ... I believe myself | to be idiot in multiple different ways which can have | multiple dimensions with multiple different scales. | beefield wrote: | And the real problem is that it is only a really small | set of things one person can have even mediocre | competence during one lifetime, whereas the space of | things where you can be completely idiot is infinite. So, | as a _very_ good approximation, we all are complete | idiots. | zcw100 wrote: | 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-... | ozim wrote: | 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. | asdff wrote: | >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. | lkrubner wrote: | 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... | naasking wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | knorker wrote: | > 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. | dsr_ wrote: | "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 wrote: | 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. | hamilyon2 wrote: | 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. | mensetmanusman wrote: | Complexity scales with node count. This leaves an opening for | talented folks who embrace the complexity and figure out how to | get things done. | davidgl wrote: | See the work on Scaling Laws that | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West has been working on | at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute, there | are loads of interviews on youtube where he summaries his work. | gilbetron wrote: | Thanks for the recommendation, I just grabbed his book :) | peakaboo wrote: | 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 wrote: | Didn't read your comment but the answer is the mating habits of | the common walrus, _Odobenus rosmarus_. | RandomLensman wrote: | 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. | dboreham wrote: | Also relevant: https://codahale.com/work-is-work/ | giantg2 wrote: | The tag at the very bottom answers the title question - | bureaucracy. It doesn't have to involve the prisoners dilema. | namenotrequired wrote: | That only answers "What is it called". It doesn't answer the | question that the author asks, which is "why" | giantg2 wrote: | 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. | nikkinana wrote: | Not China, they do what they're told. | ajb wrote: | 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 | coding123 wrote: | > google and can regularly fire your customers | | They don't fire the customers (advertisers) they fire the | users. | ehnto wrote: | From what I hear, even Google is mired by years of product, | organisational and tooling debt. | schnable wrote: | That would make sense as to why they kill of products, in | attempt to reign this in. In reality, killing products is | still pretty uncommon even for Google. | | Just today, I logged into Google Calendar on my iPhone and | the mobile UI looked like it hadn't changed since 2008 and it | was missing a ton of features. | jeffbee wrote: | The mobile web UI for calendar has indeed been abandonware | for about 5 years and even before that it was starting to | look pretty crusty. I think largely because nobody cares | and everyone on mobile uses the app. The mobile web | interface of Gmail hasn't changed in years either but it is | still maintained and also wonderfully good. | vkou wrote: | Yes, and it actively manages it. Occasionally, one of the | potential outcomes of this management becomes visible to the | outside world, when it sunsets a product. Other times, lack | of investment in this management also becomes visible, when a | product is clearly languishing. | | As in any other company, headcount is always limited, and | some products are funded by nothing but the willpower of | _particular_ passionate engineers /managers, which results in | a very low lottery bus factor. | datavirtue wrote: | Mire is a good word to describe what is going through my mind | when I see their recent search results. | ashtonkem wrote: | > 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. | | Often an effective strategy for this to purposefully diverge | and converge. Allow a new product to strike it out on its own, | and if it survives follow back up and homogenize the infra so | that maintenance is cheaper. | | Takes a lot of labor, but that's usually something large | organizations have in spades. | toomuchtodo wrote: | What would you say are the drivers that enable effectiveness in | an org, regardless of its size? | clairity wrote: | two keys: trust and (efficient) communication. these may or | may not be sufficient for a given org, but they're certainly | necessary ingredients. they lead to highly effective teams | via autonomy and intrinsic motivation (teams that achieve | desirable outcomes efficiently without oversight). | | these two factors are extraordinarily hard to cultivate | consistently, especially during high growth. this is | incidentally why management is so hard, and so often "bad", | because managers are often encouraged to focus on metrics, | like financials, rather than cultivating trust and fostering | effective communication. | | kanban (in japanese manufacturing) is a quintessential | example of a management system designed to foster trust (no- | fault problem-solving orientation) and communication (simple, | immediate, and well-known signaling). | | edit: should also have mentioned kaizen as a companion to | kanban in this context. | ajb wrote: | Just off the top of my head: | | An effective responsibility culture and structure. Those who | are responsible for something must have the means to effect | it. There must be a means of agreeing who is responsible for | something and an effective way to find who is responsible | when someone is blocked. Things should not languish because | no-one is responsible, nor be trampled in because everyone | wants a piece. (This is culture as well as structure, because | everyone needs to internalise what a good responsibility | structure looks like so that they negotiate it into place in | a distributed way, rather than having it imposed top down.) | | Prioritise making intelligent decisions over raw speed. In my | effective employer, if your project was late, you were | required to take a step back and really work out when it was | realistically deliverable and make sure you genuinely | understood what was now needed - better to say ONCE 'it needs | another 3 months' than 'just a another 2 weeks' 8 times. (The | ineffective company had a 5 day horizon and would burn | everyone out constantly trying to deliver next week) Related | to this is that profligate agility can work against | intelligence. The effective org could afford what would seem | like a huge amount of process, but it actually took less of | our time than the agile process in the ineffective org | because we didn't need to change our minds as often. | | Making effective use of staff's skills. The means everything | from: Leaders need to recognise what they aren't expert in, | not having a destructive people culture, giving people larger | pieces of work that they can master rather than splitting | everything into a million fragments, allowing for development | rather than people getting type-cast. | andrekandre wrote: | > profligate agility can work against intelligence | | thank you for putting into words something i've been | inuiting for a while now... i couldn't put a finger on what | was going at some workplaces i've been in, but this really | resonates with me | | it seems in our chase for "agility" above all else, we are | sacrificing our intelligence along the way... | hammock wrote: | Can you give an example (non-code related, if you have one) of | the first bullet? | ajb wrote: | Documentation. When you're working on a new build, everything | is frequently just in your head or those of your teammates, | and that isn't a problem initially. And if you have one main | product, you don't need to spend a lot of time on documenting | which resources were for what. When you have a bunch of old | ones, which you may not actually often spend much time on, | it's much more important to be able to figure out why that | old thing is running, exactly what was shipped to customers | when (in the case of physical product). Otherwise you risk | having to do archaeology every time you turn round. Or just | not having the information when some customers says that X | has stopped working on a device that you shipped 5 years ago | but guaranteed for 10. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > 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. | ido wrote: | 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. | | What would have been a better way of handling the transition? | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > What would have been a better way of handling the | transition? | | The problems all came from the top-down direction. | Replacing the CEO with an experienced big company leader | could have solved so many issues. | | The CEO was good at founding startups and running small | teams, but that's all he really wanted to do. He was trying | to run a big company like a small startup and actively | fought big-company organization styles. | | Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google don't try to | pretend they're still startups. They embrace the fact that | they're a big company and they make it work. They're not | perfect, but it's better than a slowly failing big company | that can't accept that change is necessary. | wonderwonder wrote: | So much this. There is a very big difference between | running a startup and a large / publicly traded company. | There is no shame in a founder hiring a good ceo to | manage the company after the startup phase. I worked for | a company where they essentially grew through grit and | insane hours and became established and went public. Then | everything started going to hell. CEO was just not | prepared to run a proper company and as a result constant | production crashes, employee and customer churn. Company | survives by constantly diluting and selling more shares | now. | hef19898 wrote: | This. The things that get a start-up to IPO are not what | make a successful company after IPO. Different leaders | are needed, Google succeeded by bringing such a CEO on | bord. It is hard to see companies on a good trajectory, | from start up to mature public entity, fail due to these | purely self inflicted things. | Accujack wrote: | >it's better than a slowly failing big company that can't | accept that change is necessary. | | Or worse, a big company that is in a growth/high profit | area that takes in enough money to not fail despite | dozens of missteps. | | If you do the wrong thing long enough and don't go out of | business, then the wrong thing becomes "our way". | rurp wrote: | One of my big realizations as I've gotten more work | experience is just how much momentum matters in business. | Brand awareness along with existing customers and | relationships is huge. | | A big established company can get away with a shocking | amount of incompetence for a really long time, while a | very well run startup can easily fail. | tehjoker wrote: | Scale that up and you can see the same effect with entire | countries. | dcow wrote: | Scale that up and you can see the same effect with entire | generations. | barry-cotter wrote: | Mostly because annexation of conquered territory is | illegal. Without it at least Eastern Congo, possibly all | of it, would be part of Rwanda. There are a lot of failed | states in the world. They'd fail at defending themselves | from a competent military too. | ido wrote: | So are we using google as an example of what to do or | what not to do? | mantas wrote: | Yes | dpe82 wrote: | Agreed. It's sometimes hard to distinguish the things | Google does that contributes to its success from the | things Google can get away with (waste, etc.) because of | its success. | afarrell wrote: | This is very true. A CEO of a startup is used to | operating under Dunbar's number. For him to not actually | not know everyone is hard to admit. | [deleted] | charles_f wrote: | > 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 wrote: | > 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... | ctdonath wrote: | I've concluded that anyone using the term "best practices" in | earnest doesn't understand them. | tazjin wrote: | > Well, unless you're google and can regularly fire your | customers without going bust | | This is only true for external products. When I was at Google | it always seemed to me that the majority of engineering effort | is focused on the inside, and that the same effect exists | there. | mcguire wrote: | " _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._" | | This is one of the biggest risks I've seen, for both large | organizations and small ones. | | Large organizations are built of small organizations, and a | bunch of effective small organizations will each be moving and | shaking, and building or buying things that become part of | their infrastructure. Then one day you wake up and discover | that your overall organization is paying for 27 different | solutions to the same problem. | | Then, any attempt to collapse that down to something reasonable | results in zero productivity for quite a while and whole lot of | pissed off people. | konschubert wrote: | The question is, is it _really_ worth it to collapse it down? | ryathal wrote: | It depends, but generally yes. Collapsing to 1 may or may | not be a good thing, but you probably want less than 3-5 | different DBMS, CMS, Cloud providers, printing services, | source control systems, office supply/equipment, etc. | mcguire wrote: | And suddenly I'm reminded of the web app I put together | that needed three DB drivers... | potatolicious wrote: | At some level, absolutely. Your organizations aren't | usually totally independent units - they need to | interoperate with other organizations. | | To the extent that the spaghetti of infrastructure prevents | effective interop, that's a problem. | | And as the need for interop grows between two orgs the cost | of the various hacks, shims, and other cheap adaptations, | escalates, until unification of infrastructure starts | looking _awwwwfully_ tempting. | | Of course, unification comes with its own set of problems. | gorbachev wrote: | That depends on so many things. | | One of the things I've seen cripple large organizations is | waiting for the common infrastructure / services becoming | mature enough to be used in production. | | Teams are kept in a holding pattern, sometimes for years, | while waiting for the teams to deliver their common | infrastructure / services solutions, and they're actively | discouraged from building their own solutions, because the | enterprise-wide solution is "just around the corner". | hintymad wrote: | Another reason that I observed is that large organizations are | extremely afraid of mistakes regardless of expected loss. Such | companies appoint gatekeepers, and those gatekeepers are by | nature risk averse. The gatekeepers will simply reject any idea | by default, unless there is a well-proven precedent. As a | result, anything moves slowly. | costcofries wrote: | This is a great summary! Large orgs are designed to move slow, | it's a necessity of calculated moves. For example, single | policy, product or process changes can affect thousands of | people and many millions of dollars. These things take time as | the ripple effects are far and wide. | | This is not to say that innovation isn't possible. In my | experience, the way to forge ahead in large orgs is to achieve | progress by example, advocacy and influence. | ___luigi wrote: | 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". | zwieback wrote: | My experience as well, although my large org sometimes seems to | move to slowly it's loads better than the startups I've been | at. | | One thing I'm realizing is really useful, and which we're doing | more and more, is putting "program managers" in charge of | projects, totally separate from "project managers", which | really should be called "people managers". With that split we | can have a senior engineer who is interested in management work | across multiple teams without worrying about the day to day | personnel issues. This only works if everyone supports this | approach but here it's working well. | robertlagrant wrote: | This sounds like terminology issues. Classically a project | manager manages a project (a think with a start and an end, | reasonably well defined) and a programme manager manages a | set of related projects. People managers depending on | intention sound like either engineering team leads, | engineering heads of, or line managers. | kqr wrote: | One crucial difference is around authority. Traditional | project managers can generally exercise authority over the | people doing the work to get what they want. | | With a program manager/people manager split, it might be | the case that the person leading the project has to truly | lead, because the actual authority sits with the people | manager. May or may not be a better structure. | serverholic wrote: | This sounds a lot like the matrix team structure. Can program | managers assign work to engineers? And if so, how do you deal | with project and program managers giving conflicting tasks? | zwieback wrote: | Yes, the program managers can assign work and they tend to | work closely with the involved people managers to balance | workload. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-30 23:01 UTC)