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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2) If she exists, and is as smart as she should be, she will realize quite quickly that her power can be used for personal gain and she will become corrupted. Power corrupts, etc. and you can't really entertain any kind of organizational solution without considering game theory of the situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Yeah I mean obviously they are compared to foogbookazonpple, but I think they're past the point where you can individually go in and make substantive change, really.
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.
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.
Why does it have to be the CEO? My first association was that Winston Wolfe character from Pulp Fiction. Wouldn´t it be neat if companies had that kind of fixer who you could call for the real hard problems? Like problems that arise from the structure of the organization and cannot be fixed on a micro level. Asking half joking, half serious.
That's who I aspire to be, but my batting average isn't that fabulous, maybe .200, and it's really difficult to sell to people, because you have to catch it right on the cusp of being a recognizable problem.
So people are inherently skeptical, and by the time it becomes obvious that they need some outside heavy hitter, it's too late for that strategy to be effective.
I'd really like to systematize it, to be known as the solution for that kind of problem, but that's a different skillset than actually solving the problem, of course.
i have a bit of a reputation for doing this, and a few personal relationships with business leaders who have tapped me for these kind of projects. in the end its kind of dysfunctional every time because various people in the org own the relevant responsibilties already and you are basically micromanaging them against their will as a prelude to termination or reorganization.
its not like the solutions are usually that hard to figure out, it's always a problem with people and their incentives ultimately.
the fixer role is basically to give confidence to the CEO that disempowering certain people is safe and there's a path out.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.