"The larger a company gets, the more inefficient it becomes."
Do you have evidence for this assertion? I thought it was fairly well established that most large companies in mature industries are usually quite efficient due to various economies of scale.
Big companies are amazingly efficient, just not in terms you consider. They earn way more dollars for each dollar spent than smaller companies. They can do that by having income sources beyond wildest dreams of smaller companies. That's the reason they got big in the first place.
And why from the point of view of footsoldier things don't look as efficient as they could be? Because they don't have to. Because inefficiency you see is negligible and trying to eliminate it could cost more money than it's worth. Heck, some income streams are larger if you work slower than you could. You could be harming your bottom line by making things more efficient.
Large companies are inefficient because they suffer from a number of problems (calculation, internal politics, Peter's principle, Parkinson's law and so on). However, they can introduce savings due to lengthening the production process, economies of scale, (external) political power and other factors.
The fact that a large company is rich does not necessarily mean that the inefficiencies don't exist.
I somewhat agree with you on "this whole software stuff is really peanuts and their mental energy is better spent on other business-related stuff". For most companies this software stuff can be mostly irrelevant, and it's our fault this is the case. As Erik Dietrich says [1], we are "efficiencers" -- we're supposed to make all kinds of processes more efficient, not just be code monkeys and copy code from StackOverflow.
You hit the nail on the head, thank you. I probably should have qualified my use of the word "efficient" with "highly" or even "incredibly" to make this more obvious.
But you can translate this to corporations, and consider that large corporations are more efficient than small ones. But large corporations have downsides, so the optimum is somewhere in the middle (?)
I've never understood the argument. I've worked in several different private companies, and calling them "Efficient" is so off base as to be laughable. Remember, a private company will happily let an import engineer go instead of giving them a small raise.
This sounds about right. This is why I don't believe in the "industry is more efficient than government" dogma. Large organizations of people are generally inefficient unless extraordinary care has gone into the engineering and maintenance of the organization.
You overstate the reliability a bit (or rather, the things we take for granted are not so reliably supported) but I'm not going to argue your broader point at all.
However, this:
Because efficient companies produce goods and services for lower prices than inefficient companies
Is not correct. Efficient companies are capable or producing goods and services for lower prices than inefficient ones, but they will typically only do so in the presence of true competition. Otherwise, companies are always quite happy to realize the fruits of higher efficiency as higher margins.
That may be an nit to pick, but it's an important one.
Large companies? Efficient? In what universe?
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