omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country.
It must be saying something profound about the human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.
But likewise, since we're fans of equality in my country, there's no emphasis on career ladders / progression; you're a developer, maybe a lead developer or architect, and then you get to management, with the only distinguishing factor being your years of experience, length of your CV, and pay grade. Pay grade is "simply" bumped up every year based on performance of both you personally and the company as a whole.
But that's n=1 experience, our own company is moving towards a career ladder system now as well. Not nearly as extensive as the big companies' though.
> omg, this sounds like the gigantic, ossified and crushing bureaucracy of a third world country.
No, it sounds like how most successful organizations work.
In any case the prompt for the thread is somebody mentioning their (subjective) view that the deep hiearachy they were operating under, made a "wrong call".
We'll never know if this true or not, but it points to the challenges for this type of organizational structure faces. Dynamics in remote layers floating somewhere "above your level" decide the fate of things. Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...
If you're not presenting an alterative system, then is it still the best one you can think of?
Not sure there has been an opportunity to objectively test what are the pros and cons of all the possibilities. The mix of historical happenstance, vested interests, ideology, expedience, habit etc. that determines what is actually happening does not leave much room for observing alternatives.
It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees were to make decisions by everyone talking to everyone else you can try to do the math on what the complexity of that is.
Small organizations define efficiency based on time to make number go up/down. Meanwhile, if something bad happens at 2am and no one wakes up - whatever there we’re likely no customers impacted.
Larger organizations are really efficient at ensuring the p10 (ie worst) hires are not able to cause any real damage. Every other thing about the org is set up to most cost effectively ensure least damage. Meanwhile, numbers should also go up is a secondary priority.
These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what?
> If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees
Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy?
And given an organization's size, what determines the height of its "pyramid"?
The fact that management consultancies are making (in perpetuity) a plush living by helping reduce "middle management layers" tells you explicitly that the beast has a life of its own.
Empire building and vicious internal politics that are disconnected from any sense of "efficiency" are pretty much part of "professional bureaucracies" - just as they are of the public sector ones. And whether we are clients, users or citizens we pay the price.
Compared to numerous small companies of the aggregate same size. It's not just an assertion, Google (and other big companies) produces incredibly high rates of value per employee and goods at extremely low costs to consumers.
>Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy?
Coase told us the answer to this[1]. Organizations are going to be as large as they can possibly be until the internal cost of organization is larger than the external costs of transaction with other organizations. How large that is depends on the tools available to organize and the quality of organization, but tends larger over time because management techniques and information sharing tools become more sophisticated.
The reason why large organizations are efficient is obvious if you turn it on its head. If we were all single individual organizations billing each other invoices we'd have maximum transaction costs and overhead. Bureaucracy and hierarchies minimize this overhead by turning it into a dedicated disciplines and rationalize that process. A city of 5 million people, centrally administered produces more economic value than a thousand villages with the same aggregate population.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937...
The alternative to a large organization with a sky-high hierarchy is not an inefficient solopreneur but a smaller organization with (possibly) a flater hierarchy. Even strictly within the Coase logic the "external cost" can be artificially low (non-priced externalities [1]), ranging from the mental health of employees, to the impact of oligopolistic markets on society's welfare etc. This creates an unusually generous buffer for "internal costs".
I'd say that large bureaucracies are endemic to the public sector in large part because they can't use efficient price or profit mechanisms.
A firm doesn't typically operate like a market internally, but instead it operates like a command economy. Orders flow from the top to be implemented at lower levels, feedback goes the other way, and divisions should generally be more collaborative than competitive.
Bureaucracy manages that command economy, and some amount of it is inevitable. However, inevitability does not mean infallibility, and bureaucracies in general are prone to process orientation, empire-building, and status-based backstabbing.
> ranging from the mental health of employees
Nitpick: I think that disregard of employee mental health is bad, but I don't think it's an unpriced externality. Employees are aware of their own mental health and can factor it into their internal compensation/quality-of-life tradeoff, staying in the job only when the salary covers the stress.
I think the main differences between private sector bureacracy and public sector bureaucracy are:
- I'm forced to fund the public sector bureaucracy
- There's no competitive pressure putting a lid on public sector bureaucracy
There is some competitive pressure with pro-business politicians wanting things to be better, but unless you're in the team seeing the problems I think they struggle to spot what could actually be improved.
But the assumption that individuals actually make that calculation is not necessary for economic models to be useful.
For example, players who act in a game theoretically optimal way in some game will, over the long run, dominate and displace players who don't.
This is true even if those players don't actually know any game theory.
> human condition that such immense hierarchies are not just functioning but actually completely dominating the landscape.
...how else do you propose to dominate a landscape? do you know of any landscapes (real or metaphorical) that are dominated by a single person? and what does this have to do with the human condition? you know that lots of other animals organize into hierarchies right?
if this comment weren't so short i'd swear it was written by chatgpt.
> if this comment weren't so short i'd swear it was written by chatgpt.
ditto