Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but it seems to me that as organizations grow, more and more resources are poured into everything other than what made them successful in the first place. Bureaucracy grows, hierarchies increase, teams upon teams organize, things are envisioned and realized and KPId, volumes of messages and emails shift back and forth, endless hours are met in meetings...

At the same time, productivity is reduced, actual communication diminished, gatekeepers slow everything and everyone down, fiefdoms form with their territorial turf wars, naked emperors run amok fanned by yes-men. On average three people out of a hundred are doing something actually useful, while the company slowly loses its grip on whatever niche monopoly has allowed it to so grotesquely exist thus far.

Everyone else is gradually PTSD'd into a corpo version of Homo Sovieticus, filling out time sheets and RTO attendance records while duly marching towards V17 in the most recent two-year plan, aligned with the corporate values writ large on the HR site's main banner.

Regression to the mean.

All companies start small. Only the absolute best survive, so there is tremendous survivorship bias for the remaining companies to comprise of fabulous people.

Naturally, when the company starts growing, it is insanely hard to be able to keep on recruiting only such fabulous people. If nothing else, it would slow the growth, snd as such is usually not prioritized.

That’s when the regression to the mean starts. Then, you start needing more process and more bureaucracy so that the middling people have any chance of keeping up.

Unfortunately, there is no deus ex machina at the end of this path, like in TFA.

I do wonder if there is a U shape here - ie at some point the company get's so large that the central control breaks down and innovation starts to happen in the cracks.

My experience of very large companies is there is an official way stuff get's done, which is different from how stuff actually get's done - which is through peer networks.

I wonder how much of that is... human nature?

it's like... we go like gangbusters in our lives doing the things that positively need to be done.

Then when we get a moment to breathe... we do the things we want to do more than the things we need to do.

Things work better with a slight sense of urgency, but less than full-on burnout (although fighting along up to burnout is probably pretty ruthlessly efficient)

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