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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Because they're not actually much more dysfunctional than smaller companies, you just hear more stories because they're bigger. Bigger means more employees for things to go wrong around, bigger means that people are more likely to be interested in hearing stories and thus other people are more likely to tell, remember, and repeat said stories.

A story about some idiot doing an idiotic thing at Google is vastly more likely to be passed around forever than a story at a random mom and pop company*. People love hearing about morons at big tech giants, and the storytellers oblige.

That, plus sufficient economies of scale or complementary tech products.

* unless that story is REALLY incredible, like that guy who went to an interview and accidentally killed the CEO's dog

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The bigness itself causes dysfunction, apart from just having more employees and more chances to have a disaster. It's the whole Dunbar's number thing, we really haven't figured out a great way to work effectively in huge groups yet.

But... some things can only be done with huge groups, so even working ineffectively can be worth it. And in a competitive setting, your competition also has these problems, so you can win in the market despite them.

The problem with tiny startups is often that people are really inexperienced with people problems. Large corps somewhat fix that by having HR departments and all. But ultimately I'm starting to think today's business often relies on some sort of hype train.

I tend to think of HR departments as a people problem, not the solution to one.

HR is often awful, sure. But it helps get the basics right.

My brother works at a small (<100 people) startup in the material sciences, and the amount of times that his and his co-workers pay statements got messed up in creative ways is incredible. Meanwhile I'm working at a decades old big company and never had any problems like that.

Yeah if HR would stick to benefits administration / support and nothing else, I would have no issues with them.

There are plenty of businesses that don't rely on hype, you just won't find them on HN. The average supermarket chain, steel mill or insurance company just produce valuable goods or services that people and/or businesses want to buy, and they can be stable businesses for decades or even centuries. Hacker news is a forum hosted by a VC that predominantly invests in software startups however, and so you won't find a lot of stories here about companies that don't fit that mold.

Seems to attract broken people searching for greatness.

> The bigness itself causes dysfunction

It does, but the flip side is that the bigness also causes some greater efficiencies due to economies of scale or specialization.

In my experience bigger companies are more dysfunctional, but they appear less so the higher up in the company you are.

When you're just some low-level worker for a mega corp high-level decisions tend to get passed down with little to no context through several layers of management half of whom are disconnected from the issues you face on the ground, and the other half are disconnected from the decision making at the top.

This does cause some dysfunction, but I agree with you that it's not often not as bad as it seems when you have context of the why decisions are being made.

Not all companies do such a bad job at communication either and flatter organisation structures can help empower the people on the ground to make decisions which might otherwise need the approval of several layers of management. But still, in a large company there's inevitably always going to be some disconnect which will cause some level of dysfunction that you wouldn't get in a small company.

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