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Comment by scottcha | Hacker News Reader

Just an anecdote but my family member does university research and gets grants from NASA (also is ex NASA and left NASA due to too many rest & vest folks). In the last round of reviews there were 20+ NASA employees sent locally to review for a couple 1 hour meetings. Initial take from the outside is it looked like a seriously bloated process.

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Any large organisation operates the same way. Once a business reaches a certain size, you can't implicitly trust every individual with critical functions. Statistically, someone will eventually break something in a catastrophic way.

To prevent that, organisations introduce policies, processes, and review committees to keep things running smoothly.

It’s always possible to cut back bureaucracy, but it’s a constant balancing act between efficiency and security.

Sure but large organizations that operate as for-profit businesses will collapse. Government organizations can last much longer and sometimes never collapse under the weight, they just entirely stop being effective.

Some things can only be achieved by large and inefficient organisations though. E.g. no for-profit enterprise would have been able to get to the moon in the 60s.

As someone who worked inside Honeywell for 10 years, I can tell you that "large organizations that operate as for-profit businesses will collapse" is absolutely not a true generalization. Everything the GP said about large organizations is true, and after a decade of seeing HW as one of the worst organizations in practice, their stock price was much higher than when I joined because that's the outcome the C suite pursued.

This reliance on the profit motive to enforce a Darwinian culling of private enterprises is a spherical cow.

> This reliance on the profit motive to enforce a Darwinian culling of private enterprises is a spherical cow.

Absolutely. Large organizations tend towards self-preservative activities in the long run. One such thing is rent-seeking and regulatory capture (i.e. getting laws passed that entrench and defend your business from disruption).

It also seems that a lot of forces in the economy tend to favor mergers and centralization, which protects businesses from disruption and further entrenches their positions. Eventually the profit dictates that they'll raise prices to cover their inefficiencies and it's ultimately consumers that lose, because they can't exit the system and competition is dead.

The scale isn't that different if you look at larger firms. Sears started ailing it was the early 80s, and it's still sort of in existence, limping along.

Meanwhile, Meta spent $80 billion on VR and AR, because they felt like it. Apple spent $10 billion developing a car and then cancelled. Most Google X projects get cancelled.

Tech companies are not efficient. As long as they make gobs of money, they don't have to be.

>>Tech companies are not efficient.

Wait till you hear the supposed 'top talent' they hire doesn't perform any better than most normal people you would meet at any company.

Im guessing when you are rich, you tend to use that as a justification to do whatever you want.

Start ups succeed despite chaos, not because of chaos. Its crazy how brakes are now being confused for accelerators.

They're firing probationary employees -- newer hires and recent promotions. The "rest & vest" types don't fall into that category.

Take the price of that trip and divide it by the amount of money they allocated during the trip.

You’ll find that, if being in person corrects one grant approval /rejection mistake, the trip saves >>> 100x what it costs.

Also, typical grant processes like that involve months of prep work for each person, and they certainly made all the easy decisions before meeting in person.

So, the day or so they spent on discussions was to reconcile disagreements and misunderstandings with high monetary stakes.

Sure maybe but that's not their concern here, and fixing bloat is not their goal. Elon musk is dismantling the state for his own benefit. Someone doing some similar things could have a worthwhile purpose, but he does not.

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