alt Hacker NewsMany of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing.
Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and substance-free buzzword-heavy documentation/presentations to disguise this fact. Others may become ensnared in this web, and will rightly express the criticisms that the author is attempting to debunk.
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Indeed. Most people who seek employment at big tech do so because of the money, not because of the mission.
I read it as saying that even if you solved the incentive misalignments, you would still have very similar annoying symptoms to what people complain about today. So you have to be careful in looking at any particular annoyance to disentangle which aspects of it are inherent complexity to a large company and which are BS. But I already believed that, so I may be steelmanning the article too much.
I think this is akin to x% of the worker ants doing all the work. Once you get to a big enough scale and have to delegate I'm sure every company hits this.
I just wish we didn't have to rely on hiring 100 on paper workers for 5 excellent people committed to the company...
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work.
What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made.
You can't run a bridge building company without knowing how to build a bridge. You can't run a law firm without knowing law.
You don't need to know all the nitty gritty - big picture is important - but understanding the product _in depth_ is a requirement in any business.