alt Hacker NewsOnce a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.
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I was hired as employee 500 and now we are at 5000 (numbers rounded to protect the innocent)
It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see
It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process
Some off the top of my head observations:
You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional
It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need
Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down
Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard
Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own
That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
But Microsoft in 2000 to 2005 was still huge and had the best browser, OS, dev environment, smartphone, and messenger .
So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.