Hacker News Reader

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?

Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.

If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on.

For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute.

We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.

> Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.

I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.

The real problem is that small companies assume that Google must know what’s it’s doing and that even though google is trying to solve different problems, the only right thing to do is try to copy them.

fastmail.com is a small company with a vastly superior UI to gmail.

> They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code

It looks like Theo is a US company, so perhaps "zip code" is more appropriate but those of us in the rest of the world are generally frustrated by websites which present a form field which could be called the generic 'postal code', meaningful to anyone in the world, labelled as 'zip code', something which is specific to the US.

Looking at the Theo website, it appears they use BigCommerce, which is an Australian ecommerce as a service site, which explains why they don't use 'zip code'. Although, your usability complaint about the behaviour of the field absolutely stacks up and suggests they might be using the wrong form widget there.

Many many sites have these "it's more easier and also convenient I swear" finder pages that refuse to just give you a map to click on. Wanna see if you can pick something up there next time you're in $city? Better google for a zip code in that city.

In this way there are a lot of web developers making money preventing businesses from acquiring all of the customers who might be interested in them.

"It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code" really? Get off your US centric view of the world my friend (which is often a UI problem in and of itself) only the US and Philippines use Zip codes.

At a high, conceptual level this is the sort of error people make all the time:

1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation.

2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about this complex situation.

3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions.

This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things. It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about "personalities."

Organizations can be very consistent in their behavior as a part of their internal organization and culture. Treating a corporation as a Chinese Room is a useful abstraction.

I think it's less of a moral narrative, and more to do with the way our brains process information - at a physical and organizational level, the human brain is like a series of stacked filters, cutting extraneous (or what our brain thinks is extraneous) information down to a size that can be interpreted by the higher cognitive functions within some acceptable limit of stress. The exact boundaries of what and how much information constitutes stress is different for everyone, itself produced by a learning process.

Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains.

The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).

> The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).

IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group.

This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both.

The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.

While I think on one hand you're right, on the other hand I don't think it's really an error, because to end users the company is a monolithic entity, and the complex circumstances that led to something breaking for a particular user aren't important because at the end of the day their thing is broken.

So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all people working there are bright

For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?

> So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all people working there are bright

> For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?

They can be, but I don't think it is inevitable.

By way of analogy, large herds of herbivores are arguably much stupider than the individual animals, while insect colonies are considerably more intelligent than their components. Packs of predators (eg. wolves) generally seem to be approximately as smart as an individual, at least so far as hunting is concerned.

Human organizations vary considerably and it isn't hard to come up with examples ranging from 'dumb as a bag of hammers' to 'smart as a whip'. Analogies to various mental illnesses may sometimes apply as well.

Absolutely. Plus, and organisation can do dumb things because a single wrong person in the hierarchy of such a system can make a bad decision that takes hundreds of man years to undo.

The reason small startups can innovate faster than large enterprises is that they can’t afford to make stupid mistakes. There’s no such evolutionary pressure on enterprises, unless it until the scale of the stupid mistake becomes life threatening for the company.

> wrong person [...] a bad decision that takes hundreds of man years to undo

Makes me wonder if there's a real life story behind that

> small startups [...] can’t afford to make stupid mistakes

Yes, well, I'd say all companies do stupid mistakes?

And the small ones need to be good at noticing when they do it, and revert, undo :- )

I like how UK English uses plurals when referring to organizations. Rather than "Google is bad", it's "Google are bad", in recognition of the fact that Google is made up of lots of people.

That’s because it’s a single organisation. Just because it is made up of tens of thousands of individuals doesn’t stop it being a single entity.

You (and all other humans) are made up of thousands of bacteria and other specialised cells, but we don’t treat you as plural, although you are also a single entity consisting of tens of thousands of components.

It's nice for people to realize how bias helps shape this perspective but it doesn't change the fact that things are broken.

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?

Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.

They might hire the best developers and designers, but the internal politics get in the way of them doing their jobs. UI in particular is prone to antipatterns such as bikeshedding and highest paid person in the room having the final say.

I think the mean arrives a lot sooner than that. The situation where PMs and managers and goddamn copy writers start changing the design is commonplace even in smaller orgs. If you hire a competent designer to build an accessible and attractive application, just let them do their job! If you want design by committee instead then just fire the designer and get on with it.

As a designer, feedback from a good "goddamn copy writer" is invaluable. If they can't succinctly describe the thing I've designed to somebody who doesn't already know how to use it, or they can't fit what they need to say into the spaces I've left for them, it's often a sign that I haven't designed it very well.

This is absolutely true.

However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies.

If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt.

If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing.

It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands.

You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.

Maybe you shouldn't focus on getting 'the best person' on the correct place, but try to make 'the best process' for evaluating and improving UI/UX and mandate it's followed everywhere. One of the projects at my workplace decided to document every design decision from all viewpoints including the final decision made. Seemed to help a lot against people arguing in circles and/or bikeshedding.

And that way lies large corporate Agile. All work becomes crap, because you can no longer tell the difference between good people encumbered by bureacracy and crap people using the bureaucracy as an excuse.

My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.

Process works though, because not everyone on your team is going to be an "A" student, and if you have 500 employees, you simply don't have the time and bandwidth to make a custom process for each person. There's wide ranges of ability at every company, even prestigious FAANGs and investment banks and pretty much everywhere. The great benefit of layering on heavy process and bureaucracy is that you can get homogenized, reliable, reasonable-quality, but not consistently outstanding, output from the A, B, C, and D players, without terrible risk that someone who doesn't know what they are doing (who every company has) fucks everything up. As the saying goes, every process you encounter is scar tissue from a past fuck-up. What you sacrifice with all this bureaucracy is the absolutely brilliant output you could be getting from the A players, but the cost is usually worth mitigating the risk of disaster.

You're absolutely right, and that's the reason large companies end up being so inefficient.

Eventually, some nimble whippersnapping startup who only hires "A players" eats the large enterprise's breakfast. But to satisfy the shareholders, the startup takes on more work and to cope with that work, they start hiring B players... and so it goes on the enterprise merrygoround.

There's no real solution, just different ways of playing the game.

You’re absolutely right. Steve Jobs warned about process and process people as well and it’s not surprising.

Intereting talk :- ) "Steve Jobs: Content vs Process", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE 3 minutes.

I'd guess that it'd work better with a better-than-good-enough Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user interface however s/he wants,

than to go looking for the "magic" UX improvement process

That’s the SJ interview I was thinking about…

Jeff Bezos as well:

>As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...

> My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.

Sounds like you have a decent lightweight process-making-and-revising process. Most organizations don't. Instead, most organizations create processes mostly ad-hoc in reaction to some trauma, and then never remove them. It accumulates, like scar tissue that only ever gets thicker unless it is ripped away, which just causes different scars.

“The best process” makes it sound more mechanical than you probably intend. I think you mean: “focus on propagating tools and habits which raise the quality of design conversations”

> mandate

The problem with mandatory processes is that people don’t take responsibility for the outcome of a process over which they have no power. Processes should be tools people can pick up to improve clarity.

In the small group inside the large FAANG-adjacent company where I work we test designs pretty thoroughly with users to settle these kinds of debates/decisions. Surely we're not the only ones.

Many companies I am familiar with are "agile" in the sense that they work on a new chunk of the waterfall every two weeks; or just justify having NFI what they are doing on the business side by just slow dripping requirements over how much time/money they have.

Arguments over features basically yield to whoever has the most soft power, which is they you see the C suite so invested in the outcome of various features... it's literally theirs.

I have worked in several, non-FAANG, but rich and successful large companies. I think you are spot-on.

I wish HN had a 'follow' feature...

Anyway, thanks for your quality comments.

https://hnrss.org/user?id=pembrook

Oh my, what have you done.

Follow and Reply Received are the only two social features I would like to see officially implemented.

Then HN would be a proper social media site, and by tradition we'd all have to start saying how awful it is, and endlessly post links to articles about us quitting it. /s

dang maintains a separate notification system for HN. It's been around for a long time, but not many people seem to know about it (only 2137 people are subscribed).

http://www.hnreplies.com/

> If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted

Not completely wasted. At least they made sure the best designer is not working for a possible competitor.

And the good designer has to be matched with the good pm.

There are indeed only so many good designers.

There are exactly zero good product/project managers out there. There are some really nice and good and capable and kind and talented people who have this label attached to them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are some good product/project directors. There are some good product/project evangelists. But no good product/project manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and productivity and delivering the right product to the right people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the years, in every case, they've become less likable people because of it and we're no longer a net positive collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy and felt less about themselves over time.

Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of this "position" remains at zero good ones.

Your assertion is hard to engage without knowing the distinctions you identify between "manager", "clerk", "director", and "evangelist", and what it would mean for a so-called manager to be "just masquerading as some other responsibility".

> Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager [...], but I stand by my assertion.

What would it take to change your mind?

This attitude is why I insist on having my developers manage at least one small project before moving to a senior role.

This is a cop out, I think.

Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.

> Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.

What you're describing is an extraordinary team composed of regular individuals.

Sure, but the limiting factor isn’t access to extraordinary people; hence the cop out.

In automotive, aircraft and many other industries, it's commonplace for them to manage multiple concerns and balance them more or less at the same level of importance.

Comfort, internal space, manufacturability, safety, and so many other aspects are carefully taken in consideration during the design phase. Trade-offs are constantly made in order to reach a balanced design. And that, for some reasons I can only speculate about, doesn't seem to be happening in the software industry.

For quite a long time, technologies advance way faster than our ability to fully understand their possibilities and implications. I believe it explains, partially at least, our current struggles.

> As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically.

This is extremely true in my experience, but how can you fight against this as an organization scales? Just simplify the org structure and define strict definitions for what each level is responsible for?

Very small teams with a very specific area of responsibility.

The moment you get whole departments involved you’ve already lost.

But then inevitably you have either overlap or conflict between these small teams, because one of them needs something that's within the other's responsibility. Larger structures necessarily form.

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?

Humans suck at dealing with complexity. Companies are semi-arbitrary globs of humans. Even an extremely small company has enough complexity that one person may not understand it all or make mistakes dealing with it.

The bigger question is, how does any company get anything done at all?

This is what the phrase "design by committee" summarises succinctly.

> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?

When you have N IT specialists with years of intimate experience with a certain design paradigm designing stuff, it becomes extremely difficult to even consider outsider perspective.

How many working on laptops have touchpads that never ever upon release move the pointer slightly? Close to zero. Mouse people may not even know of this issue.

How much of that can be attributed not to company policies but to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ?

The only way for bad interface to ship is for good designers to do nothing!

More in general, they're so big they won't fail, there is not much pressure on making the right choice but in showing someone we thought about things.

Also, the bigger the company the duller the job. After a while you just implement the damn button and stop caring or looking for improvements.

I'm a distributed systems engineer with 20 years exp currently replacing a ten year old feature with something that looks exactly the same.

Why is a dev earning 200k/year working on CSS and JS something a grad on 60k/year could easily do?

Who knows. This industry is fucked.