Tech company patterns
richg42.blogspot.com
richg42.blogspot.com
To explain this mega-pattern I start to the bottom: in the past we have had blacksmiths that build their own tools regularly, it was common in chemistry industry produce in-house any "glass made lab equipment", it was common between carpenters to build most of their tools, these were mostly made of wood and blades are made by the nearby blacksmith that also buy wood stuff from the carpenter and I can keep going for long. Now without tools essentially designed and made by very few subjects (yep, there are tons of electric/pneumatic/... tools producers but they do not really produce them, only design few aspects around pre-made components) nobody can work anymore.
In IT it's no different: in the past we have had many different architectures, software etc, now anything is built essentially around ARM or x86 and mostly around very few key software components.
Long story short: most type of companies you identify are not free player of a free market but only lego player that depend on lego brick suppliers that are more and more few, more and more powerful.
Who knows how things will end up because of the state of things. It'll be interesting to look back ten or twenty years from now and see where our current trajectory took us.
Another problem is actual kind of private polarization, I mean if we end up after an "evolution cycle" with few universities that essentially hold, build and spread knowledge is not much a problem as long as universities are public/open it's only a matter of how distance we have to travel to study well. But when knowledge start to be concentrated in private hands things change for worse.
Imaging few scenarios: what if we all communicate trough $bigEnterprise services and $bigEnterprise have extensive data mining knowledge? How easy for them became knowing anything that going to happen between anyone else and so direct their investments for their own good possibly against anyone else interest? What if our communications relay on "aggregators" from such big subject so that it can spread certain news and reduce diffusion of other news?
An ancient proverb say that power corrupt, when we get "corrupted" as a society it's dangerous but It's a thing we can handle between us all, when we get "natural dictatorship" because of centralization well... It's easy to understand that's not good for us.
Diversity will sacrifice efficiency and that's unlikely in current capitalistic scenario where pinching every ounce of performance from tools and employees is the norm.
-- A Thousand Plateaus
https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Capitalism-Theory-Redux-Srni...
There was massive attrition despite retention bonuses.
Just the ability to tell the market they acquired some company is the reason for the acquisition. That should inform where you fit post acquisition.
> Products are legendary and set the bar. There are two types of employees: The "Old Guard" that worked on the earlier legendary products, and everyone else. Can be a very good choice if you can fit in and get shit done. Don't expect to become an insider anytime soon if ever. Only old guard workers can be insiders.
Quite frankly, this sounds like what the top level at EVERY place would select, if you asked them to identify which pattern their company fits.
IME The difference is that at the non-tech company all the decision makers saw individual contributors the same way - didn't matter if you were a PhD scientist or a Business Analyst. Individual contributors were cogs in a business process.
At the tech company some of the decision makers seem to understand that technical people are "advanced cogs" and not just regular cogs. To me, that's the difference between feeling totally useless at the non-tech company and occasionally useful at the tech company.
If you're a software guy at a large global hotel, it's meh. You are a tier 3 or 4 employee. They make money booking rooms - anything else is a cost component.
Software companies see developers as an asset because they build the product. The dynamic is different and the pay and respect reflect that.
One time I almost quit a start up to take a little more money at a hedge fund to do their internal software. The start up CEO talked me out of it and I learned an important lesson about my trade.
pretty good.
also let's you get through most paywalls
There are also healthier companies out there (healthy in that they are managed by non-sociopaths and share a respect for their employees) as well. Two that I'm personally familiar with would be:
Lifestyle business - company has a diversified revenue stream which remains relatively constant over the years, management runs the business for continuation, there aren't big hiring binges or firing binges. Same offices as they have been in for a while, everyone gets along in a family sort of way. Little in the way of advancement, just jobs that pay a given amount for as long as you want to do them.
Services business - where the day to day activity consists of new customers signing up for the service, old customers falling by the wayside, there is a sales group, a 'customer facing' group, and a maintenance group. Maintenance consists mostly of adding new features, porting to new environments, retiring what technical debt there is. Customer facing consists of solving specific problems with the service for that customer. And sales are sales.
You have your own product? Your own idea? Great! Sell your product to bigger customers to keep you afloat and do whatever they want because you only have 2-5 of them and they keeping you afloat not realising that you just became a service provider.