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Comment by LennyWhiteJr | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count

1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg

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I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg

It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)

The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?

Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.

>"The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?"

Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual initiative mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.

Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.

As you get larger there is a fire everyday and ever more competing priorities on which fires get put out.

How much money does movie maker bring Microsoft? Now which executive would want to prioritize movie maker so much that they would directionally alter the company to fix this? Consider the issue that the execs had was fixing all the issues involved a huge number of teams.

Discredit to Bill here but I honestly think he was the only one who had the power to fix this. A Jobs-like figure is the only person with the organizational power and freedom to drive details like this to completion. Anyone else would end up in a power struggle

I drown in support tickets daily that used to go nowhere. Then people started realizing that I knew what I was talking about and not some standard business user. Now I still have to open tickets, but get visibility of the people who know what they’re doing on their end (having been moved up from lowly support to oversee some ticket filling company that doesn’t know crap). We get tom complain to one another how shit is broken, wait mandatory change periods and then get something working by exploiting loopholes because some process was developed and someone put a lot of money behind it.

Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)

You forgot the part where the leader gets more and more frustrated, it’s like a game of hot potato, if you’re the last one holding the potato when Leader finally cracks, all of it lands on you!

I’ve been in this situation in a small company as well. The owner wasn’t managing the company and there was no other manager. So the owner would express his frustration in an all hands meeting “I don’t like x” or “we’re going to do y from now on” but he would not assign the task to anyone, or give ownership. He would come up with some insane new goal but no plan, no equipment, and no one person who’s in charge of making sure the required resources, time and responsibility is assigned. So nothing would change, a month later there would be another meeting, with a middle aged man having a tantrum about why did no one do anything!? Why is no one listening to me?

You might be thinking it’s a good opportunity to accept some responsibility, it might get you a promotion or be a good learning opportunity. Yeah I tried that for a while, if you succeed, congratulations, you now have one new task for which you’re responsible for without any extra compensation or benefit. If you fail? Well guess who’s getting the blame..,

I have been this owner AND this employee, at different times in my career. As the employee, it's as you describe -- having goals described to the team without actual tasks being assigned to individual employees/teams is a recipe for things not getting done. As the owner (especially with a small team) nothing is more aggravating than having employees who sit around waiting to be told exactly what to do, with no real concern for how the company provides value for its customers; employees who think they're underpaid no matter how much they make and therefore do the bare minimum unless they're getting a bonus/raise/promotion.

Yeah I totally get it. In this situation you could see employees burning out because of the lack of management or leadership and the chaos of the company. Like everyone cared at first and tried real hard but eventually almost formed a learnt helpless. The implicit message was don’t try, just do the bare minimum and avoid trouble. We were also paid minimum wage. Many employees were doing unpaid hours as well.

If you provided leadership in your case then I think it’s different

I think the thing that really made it horrible is like I said. The boss would say x needs to happen but would not think through the details, buy the equipment, allocate the time or human resources. Someone still had to work out how to do those things and who was going to do what.

I’ve had “Boss I can fix this in one line of code.” situations, but nobody of 6 people wanted to make the call despite involving themselves excessively.

So nothing got done.

So the temperature on the issue went up.

So management whose failure was their own could only think of engaging more managers and processes….

Never ended.

I work at small companies now, less money but I enjoy it more. I just fix things and everyone is happy.

The Soviet Union didn't fall, it got merged into Microsoft

It’s interesting how monopolistic corporations can fall prey to the same dynamics as authoritarian countries with centralized economies.

Both will eventually develop a strict hierarchy where you're only accountable to people up the chain of command, not down. There is no way to prevent that because it's a lot easier to keep one person satisfied than a whole team you're supposed to lead, so almost every manager naturally switches to working that way.

The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.

Capitalism at its finest! Or wait, never mind

> This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies.

Agreed. Even at companies known for having a great culture and being "different from the rest", the Game of Thrones politics is still there - it's just more hidden and polite. I was a senior exec in the biggest BU at just such an F100 valley tech giant for >10 yrs (one level from the CEO). The company actually did have a nicer environment than its peers, no 360 reviews, no 'up or out' mandates, and a vibe genuinely a cut above.

While the net effect was more pleasant day to day and teams were insulated a few more levels down than most places, the brawling over headcount, budget and revenue attribution was simply practiced far more artfully. Sadly, I think it's just endemic to the breed of "large public corp" and while the best may be better, none are immune.

I think you're leaving out a key aspect of the problem: not one of those people had the scope of responsibilities to really fix the issue. There was the website, windows update, and OS team, all being fed by a variety of product teams with marketing and delivery concerns. At root, Bill's problems were a coordination issue spanning half the organization. If you were on that email chain, you wouldn't want ownership either because that herding the rest of the cats towards a comprehensive fix that would probably restructure the whole company.

In my experience it's kinda different. The serious issue that raised by higher up usually means more scope, visibility, bonuses and potential bonuses. Teams usually fights to get the important issues(whichever the higher thinks that's important) as their team's work. The drawback is that it's very possible that multiple teams are fighting for the same pie and resulting in duplicated work.

In the end if there are enough incentives(usually money) people would work on those.

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