I feel it's all rooted in bad leadership. Leaders who don't understand who's actually doing the work hire more folks like them and then there is a chain reaction. Unfortunate, but true, part of most big companies.
Big[1] companies tend to collapse under their own bureaucracy.
Executives either don't really care, don't hear about problems, or don't trust anyone enough to delegate power to someone who would care (or they are incapable of hiring people who do care / are trustworthy)
Middle managers don't get rewarded for risks that succeed, they are motivated mostly to CYA
Committees are inherently unproductive, and become "scorekeeping grounds" for petty people who are in otherwise denied any power
Jobs are staffed with people who won't rock the boat because the reward for rocking the boat doesn't offset the downside of getting fired
Everybody down to the "productive" employees (somebody who might actually redesign the site) gets so whipped and dispirited that they tell themselves that this is how The Real World is.
Turtles all the way down... apathy, self-deception, excuses, and groupthink.
[1] I say big, but at one job, I saw this happening in a team of about 20. It really depends on the individual group's inclination towards buck-passing and bet-hedging
Well, it's a specific consequence of bad management. Identifying patterns like this is valuable, I think.
I agree that there's always someone responsible for this, even if it's the CEO who fails to empower subordinates to do this at their level.
It could be that many other problems boil down to parts of process not being owned by anyone. That is, that all management problems are ownership gaps in disguise. I'm not sure.
The problem isn't just the experience or capabilities it's the internal politics.
You have dozens of people with competing interests some of who are actively working against you and the C suite doesn't know what is really going on our what to do because all the information they are receiving is intentionally being distorted by people trying to spin it so they can keep creeping up the ladder.
The biggest enemy of a large organization is almost always itself.
To a certain degree, and in my experience, all companies have this problem. Sometimes it’s at a team scale but for others it’s at an organization scale.
The thing that gets me in medium sized organizations is mixed messages from different sides of management. I feel like poor communication tends to be the rule here rather than the exception. This includes cases where I have been hired as a firefighter.
The thing that gets me in large companies is backstabbing psychopaths that ritually abuse the common assumption that everyone is working together, in order to elbow their way ... somewhere.
If you work with a group of smart people who are able to selflessly say "Hey I don't know about this" or "Maybe I made a mistake there, how can as a team change the process for these decisions so that we prevent making this kind of mistake in future?" ... treasure it.
The pervasive problem I've seen is bad accountability models, where the person who knows how to do something is not the one officially responsible (but ultimately it is because they get fired of course, however they're not responding to higher management about it). This causes huge tension and also miscommunication. Knowing how to do something should at least give you more decision power on how to move forward with a problem, but what ends up happening is extra overhead explaining solutions and options just so a decision is made by someone else that might still not understand and make the wrong decision anyway. This also causes a bottleneck and compounds the problem by making the org. very slow to respond to changes in direction.
Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution, and bad managers tend to be the ones that have the least understanding of the problems, but somehow make the most decisions.
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.
There are a few big assumptions in what's written above, but reality is:
- Not all big companies are ran efficiently.
- Most managers/leaders don't/can't create a culture of trust where they empower their people.
I don’t think middle management are the ONLY cause, but I do agree that once you start getting layers of management, managers “shielding their teams” from the rest of the company, cross-team dependencies that require lots of planning, and execs/upper-management that are very disconnected from the details of the business and product, you’re basically doomed to mediocrity-at-best.
Good point. And people with similar mindsets/POVs tend to be at the top of such large organizations. I think there's just a certain way of being in the world that makes some people inclined to a) want to be in charge, and b) downplay these kinds of diffuse, semi-intangibly-expensive problems. We need better ways of explaining problems to them.
I‘m working in a strongly hierarchical org,
whit very high N number
The persons in charge, empowered to make
decisions are so far from reality
Yeah. I've seen it happen when managers are literally just a level or two up and don't come from an engineering background.
I think it's inevitable, honestly. I think it's fundamentally impossible for management to really understand or respond to in-the-trenches stuff. That's like tasking the mayor of a large city with sweeping the streets or physically fighting crime themselves, in person. They literally cannot spend enough hours in the shoes of the folks under them to understand that stuff.
And, that's fine. Management just needs to have the humility to understand that, and has to empower people/groups that do have their boots on the ground to fix those problems.
It's not unique to this industry, although I do think the newness and explosive growth of our industry may make it particularly prone to this kind of thing.
generally agree but the anecdotal evidence I heard from a former employee about the internal dysfunction has scared me away. apparently everyone in a leadership position has a rudimentary understanding of the products they build and is chasing off all the talent like Jim Keller who are forced to deliver the bad news that they’ve made a mess they cannot easily clean up without abandoning current initiatives and starting anew with more knowledgeable leadership
Seems like kind of a corporate/organizational culture thing. Imperfectly distributed knowledge, hierarchical decision-making in groups with misaligned incentives, the limitations of communication and the capacities of individuals... These and more make it hard to operate a large enterprise intelligently and cohesively, and oversights will happen. Corporations can certainly seem to act dumb or just learn slowly as a whole, regardless of who they're made up of. If you go bigger and look at nation-scale, the same problems are present on a greater level.
If you ask why this happens and go as deep as you can, I think you'll find that the root of the problem is not per se management, but politics/government/regulations/legislation.
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