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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

I often talk about this when I do consulting work: the difference between succeeding accidentally and succeeding deliberately.

(If they are not succeeding, they can't afford to hire a consultant, of course)

It's my firm opinion that there is a U shaped curve of chaos - new companies do not yet know what they should be doing to make money, and large companies are inherently too complex for any one person (or subset of people) to actually understand what is happening.

This is why I prefer to work with and for medium sized companies - companies that can have goals and metrics that lead to success, but are not yet so large that they are inherently unknowable.

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I find medium sized companies more frustrating. IMO, they are trying to become large companies and do things that are status quo expectations of large orgs. Yet, without realizing the ways in which those things have constrained you from moving as quickly as they are or did when smaller. It’s like adding a bunch of rigidity to the process and then asking why the flexibility has been reduced.

Feedback loops of communication is what I view as the biggest inefficiency. If you CC 10 people on an email, you’ll still be chasing 3 of them for a response next week.

>This is why I prefer to work with and for medium sized companies

Out of curiosity, how do you define a medium sized company? How many people, how much revenue, etc? The way people define this varies widely, so just trying to understand how you define it.

More people than it is feasible to get into one meeting at a time :) I usually am thinking of 20+ to <200 people - probably my sweet spot is around 50-75, but it depends a lot on the people at the company. Basically the size where they start wanting to have things figured out, instead of just being amazed they work at all.

In startup terms? Private companies, usually post Series A (usually B or C) but not yet private equity unicorn rounds. In market cap terms it's 100m+ to <2b or ARR ~2m to ~25m for a sass-style company. still a "small cap" in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks! I think with all the well known tech behemoths (50K+ employees), it's easy to lose perspective and assume that a company like Databricks (2K+ employees) or Stripe (4K+ employees) is a medium sized company in comparison. I appreciate the clarification.

Yeah I mean obviously they are compared to foogbookazonpple, but I think they're past the point where you can individually go in and make substantive change, really.

I honestly wonder if it IS possible to know roughly how a company works and be able to make tactical improvements throughout. This is dismissed as micromanaging, and most people lack the curiosity necessary to accomplish it, but could a CEO/CTO actually have a good enough understanding to make changes throughout an organization and fix the dumb things that every employee knows but doesn’t have the authority to change? I suppose most executives and management spend a ton of time in meetings and not making such tactical decisions, but I do wonder if it is possible.

I’m reminded of SpaceX, who is run by Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk. Gwynne keeps the whole business machine running and manages existing programs so well that Elon has the bandwidth to dig down to a fractal level and address a lot of the weird issues & bottlenecks that everyone knows about while leading new programs extremely fast. Or at least, that’s the story (doubtless the CEO meddling has negative effects, too, but overall seems to work at least as well as traditional organizations that big). Also, maybe that can only happen in a business like SpaceX which is filled with a bunch of fantastic workers who are just really driven to make things work at all levels.

I too thought of SpaceX while reading your first paragraph. I've heard Elon Musk described as a "nanomanager".

I bet he plays the “bring me a rock” game with all of his reports.

What game is this? I'm not familiar with it

https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/2002/01/volume-5-n...

Really? Is that an argument for “bring me a rock” being a successful strategy?

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vs Vulcan and New Glenn and Ariane 6.

SpaceX Starlink vs OneWeb.

SpaceX Dragon Crew vs Boeing Starliner.

SpaceX Starship HLS vs Blue Origin HLS.

This is similar to the premise behind my "software archeology" tool idea. While working as a lowly developer at a medium-large company, I kept finding case after case where badly coded software was doing dumb/wasteful things, but I lacked the authority to fix problems from a systems perspective.

I fantasized about what if there were some kind of internal company web app, a portal or dashboard, where people at the highest levels, if they cared (I am not even if sure they did), could drill down to a "fractal level" (as you called it) and see what the software is actually coded to do, presented in a way that makes sense to a non-programmer/higher-level understanding.

The elevator pitch for this kind of IT product would be: "Software runs your business, and you don't know how it works."

Unfortunately I never could figure out how to actually turn this into a real thing. None of the common approximations of software (modeling) do a very good job of capturing subtle aspects or of being more understandable than the code itself. The one conclusion I did come to is that it would have to be something where low level developers interpret and model the code to digest it for whatever format the portal uses, and not some kind of automated distillation or analysis of the code.

This is a genuinely great idea.

I think it might in fact be impossible but if you ever figure it out you'll win all the marbles.

Agreed this is a great idea. But imo you don't need such high resolution.

Your target customers might end up being other programmers or managers though.

When you get down to it, many apparently "dumb" things are about power and status and political arm wrestling and compromise among departments.

Why does it have to be the CEO? My first association was that Winston Wolfe character from Pulp Fiction. Wouldn´t it be neat if companies had that kind of fixer who you could call for the real hard problems? Like problems that arise from the structure of the organization and cannot be fixed on a micro level. Asking half joking, half serious.

That's who I aspire to be, but my batting average isn't that fabulous, maybe .200, and it's really difficult to sell to people, because you have to catch it right on the cusp of being a recognizable problem.

So people are inherently skeptical, and by the time it becomes obvious that they need some outside heavy hitter, it's too late for that strategy to be effective.

I'd really like to systematize it, to be known as the solution for that kind of problem, but that's a different skillset than actually solving the problem, of course.

i have a bit of a reputation for doing this, and a few personal relationships with business leaders who have tapped me for these kind of projects. in the end its kind of dysfunctional every time because various people in the org own the relevant responsibilties already and you are basically micromanaging them against their will as a prelude to termination or reorganization.

its not like the solutions are usually that hard to figure out, it's always a problem with people and their incentives ultimately.

the fixer role is basically to give confidence to the CEO that disempowering certain people is safe and there's a path out.

This is the moderation fallacy, assuming that the middle is better than the extremes and not just as likely to be the worst of both worlds.

Even if the optimum is somewhere in the middle, the middle region is a spectrum and the part you picked might be worse than the ends. (Picture a sine-wave shaped graph of quality vs size.)

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